Paz, Octavio - Children of The Mire (Harvard, 1974)

Children of the Mire
The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1971-1972

Mode rn Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde
OCTA VIO PAZ
Translated by Rachel Phillips
Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
Copyright 1974 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved
Second printing 197 5
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73-8 8498
ISBN 0-6 74-116 25-9 (cloth)
ISBN 0-6 74- 1 1 6 26-7 (paper)
Printed in the United States of America
Preface
In El area y Ia lira (Mexico, 1 956), published many years ago,
I tried to answer three questions about poetry . Wha t is a poem?
What do poems say? How do poems commu nicate? This book is
an amplification of the response I tried to make to the third of
these questions. A poem is an object fashioned out of the
language , rhy thms, beliefs, and obsessions of a poet and a
society. I t is the product of a d efi nite history and a definite
society, but i ts historical mode of existence is contrad i ctory .
The p oem is a d evice which produces anti-history , even though
this may not be the poet 's intention. The poetic process inverts
and converts the passage of time ; the poem does not stop time
it contradicts and transfigures i t . Whether we are talking abou t
a baroque sonnet, a popular epic, or a fable , within its confines
time p asses d i fferently from time in history or in what we call
real life . Contradiction between history and poetry is found in
all socie ties, but only in the modern age is i t so manifest.
Response to and awareness o f the discord between society and
poetry has been the central, often secre t, theme of poe try since
the Romantic era . In this book I have tried to describe, from
the perspective of a Spanish American poet, the modern poetic
movement and i ts contradictory relationships with what we
call " the modern . "
Preface
Despi te language and cu ltural d i fferences the Western world

has only one modern poe try . I t is hardly necessary to point out
tha t "Western" em braces Anglo-American and La tin American
poetic trad itions (the latter with three branches : Spanish ,
Portuguese , a nd French ) . To illustrate the unity of modern
poetry I have chosen those episodes of i ts history which I
consider most relevant : its birth in English and German Roman
ticism; i ts metamorphosis into French Symb olism and Spanish
American modenzismo; and , finally, i ts culmination in the
avant-garde trends of the twentie th century . From its earliest
days modern poetry has been a reaction against the modern era ,
tugging first in one direction then another as the manifestations
of the modern have changed-the Enlightenment, critical
reason , l iberalism , positivism , and Marxism . This explains the
ambigui ty of its relationships-almost always beginning with
an enthusiastic devotion followed by a brusq ue rupture-with
the revolutionary movements of the modern age , from the
French Revolution to the Russian . In their opposition to
modern rationalism poets rediscover a tradition, as ancient as
man, which was kept alive by Renaissance Neoplatonism and
the hermetic and occultist sects and tendencies of the six teenth
and seventeenth centuries. This tradition crosses the eighteenth
century , penetrates the nineteenth, and reaches our own. I am
referring to analogy , the vision o f the universe as a system of
correspondences, and of language as the universe's double .
Analogy as the Romantics and Symbolists understood it is
subverted by irony , tha t is to say , by the consciousness o f the
modern age and its cri ticism of Christiani ty and other religions .
The twentieth century turns irony into humor-black, green ,
VI
Preface
or purple . Analogy and irony confront the poe t with the

rat ionalism and progressivism of the modern age ; at the same
time and j ust as violently they put him face to face with
Christianity. Modern poetry's theme is twofold : it is a con
tradictory dialogue with and against modern revolu tions and
the Christian faith s ; and within poetry and each poetic work ,
there is a d ialogue be tween analogy and irony. The con tex t
within which this double dialogue unfolds is y e t another dia
logue : modern poetry can be seen as the history of con tra
dictory relationships, fascination and repulsion intertwined ,
between Romance and Germ anic languages, the cen tral trad ition
of Grec o-La tin Classicism and the eccentric tradition of the
individual and the bizarre represented by Roman ticism; syllabic
and accentual verse .
Avant-garde m ovements in the twentieth cen tury trace the
same p atterns as in the previous cen tury , but in inverse direc
tion . The "modern ism " of the A nglo-Ameri can poets is an
attemp t to re turn to the central tradi tion of Europ e - the exact
opposite of German and E nglish Romanticism -while French
Surrealism carries German Romanticism to its furthest ex treme.
Our own peri od marks the end of the avant-gard e , and thereby
of every thing which since the eighteenth century has been
called modern art. What is in question in the second half of our
century is not the idea of art i t self, but the idea of the m odern .
At the e nd of this book I deal with p oetry that has come into
existence since the avan t-garde . Those pages unite with L os
sign as en rota cion , a poetic manifesto I published in

which now serves a s the epilogue t o El area y !a lira.
1 965,
I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to the translator, Rachel
vii
Prefa ce
Phillip s , to Ann Louise M c Laughlin, and to the poe t William

Ferguson , who helped me revise the lectures (the Charles Eliot
Norton Lectures) which make up this book.
0. P.
Cambridge , Massachusetts
June
28, 1 972
viii
Preface
Contents
1
A Tradition against Itself
The Revolt of the Future
19
4 Analogy and Irony

5
38
58
Translation and Metaphor
78
6 The Closing of the Circle
102
Revolution/Eros/Meta-Irony
103
The Patt ern Reversed
115
The Twilight of the Avant-Garde

Notes
165
Sources and Credits

Index
ix
Contents
181
177
148
Mais I ' oracle invoque pour jamais dut se taire;

Un seul pouvait au monde ex pliquer ce mystere:
-Celui qui donna l'ame aux enfants du limon.
Gerard de Nerval
(Le Christ aux Oliviers, V)
A Trad it ion against Itself
The title of this chap ter, " A Trad ition against I tself, " at first
seems a contradi cti on . Can "tradition" be that which severs the
chain and interrup ts the continuity? Could this nega tio n
become a tradition without denying itself? The tradition of
discon tinuity implies the negation not only of traditio n but of

discontinui ty as wel l . Nor is the con tradiction resolved b y
replacing the phrase "a tradition against i tself" with w ords less
obviously contradictory -such as "the Modern Tradition . " H ow
can the modern be tradi tional?
Desp i te the implicit contradiction-sometimes with full
awareness of it, as Baudelaire 's reflections in L 'art roman tique
since the beginning of the last century modernity has been
termed a tradition , and rejection considered the privileged form
of change. To say that modernity is a tradition is sligh tly
inaccurate ; I should say the o th er tradition. M odernity is a
polemical tradition which displaces the tradi tion of the momen t,
whatever i t happens to be, but an instant later yields its place to
still another tradition which in turn is a m omen tary m anifesta
tion of moderni t y . Mod ernity is never i tsel f; it is alway s the
o th er. The modern is characterized not only by novelty but by

otherness. A bizarre tradi tion and a tradi tion of the bizarre,
A Tradition against I tself
modernity is condemned to pluralism : the old tradi tio n was

always the same , the modern is always different. The former
postulates unity between past and present ; the latter, not
content with emphasizing its own differences , affirms that the
past is not one but man y ._ The trad ition of the modern is thus
rad ical otherness and plurality of pasts. The present will not
tolera te the past ; today will not be yesterd ay 's child . What is
modern breaks with the past , denies it entirely . Mqdernity
"A
is sufficient unto itself; it fou nd s its own tradition . n example

is the ti tle of Harold Rosenberg's book on art , Th e Tradition
of the New . Although the new may not be exactly the modern
certain novelties are not modern- this title expresses clearly
and succinctly the paradox at the root of the art and p oe try of
our tim e , the intellectual principle simul taneously j ustifying
and denying the m , their nourishment and their poiso n . The art
and poetry of our time live on m odernity -and die from it.
In the history of Western poe try the cult of the new and the
love of n ovelty appear with a regu lari ty which I d are not call
------- - -.-..<...--
cyclical , but which is not random either. There are periods

when the rule is the "imitation of the Ancients," othe rs which
glorify novelty and surprise . The English "metaphysical" and
the Spanish Baroque poets are examples of the latter. B o th
practiced with equal enthusiasm the aesthetics of surp rise .
Novelty and surprise are kindred term s, but they are not the
same. The c9nceits , metaphors , and other verbal devices of the
Baroque poem are designed to amaze : what is new is new if
it is unexpected . B u t seventeenth-century novelty was not
cri tical nor did i t imply the negation of tradition . On the
contrary , it a ffirmed its continuity . Gracian says the Moderns
are more witty than the Ancien ts-not that they are d i fferent.
He enthuses over the works of certain of his contemporaries,
not be cause their au thors have abandoned an older sty le,
but because they provide new a nd surprising combinations of
the same elements. Nei ther Gongora nor Gracian was revo
lu tionary in the sense in which we use the word today ; they did
not se t out to change the ideas of beauty of their time -although
Gongora actu ally d id For them n,ovelty was synonym ous not
with change b u t wi th\am azement .) To find this strange marriage
of the aesthetics of surprise and
rlegation, we must move
to
the end of the e ighteenth century , to the beginning of the

modern era. Since i ts birth , m odernity has been a critical pas
sion ; insofar as it is both cri ticism and passion , it is a d ouble
negation, as much of Classical geome tries as of Baroq u e l aby
rinths. A dizzy passion , for its culmination is the nega t ion of
itsel f: m odernity is a sort of creative self-destruction. S ince
Roman ticism the poetic imagination has been build ing monu
_
ments on ground undermined by cri ticism . And it goes on doing
so, ful ly aware tha t it is underm ined .
What distinguishes our modern i ty from that of o ther ages is
not our cult of the new and surprising, important though it is,
but the fact that it is a rejection, a criticism of the immediate
past, an interruption of continuity . M odern art is not o nl y
the offspring of the age of cri ticism, it is also i t s own c ritic. The
new is not exactly the modern , u nless it carries a doub le
.
explosive charge : the negation of the past and the a ffirmation
of something d i ffere n t . That "something" has changed name
and shape in the course of the last two centuries-from the
sensibility of the pre-Romantics to the meta-irony of D uchamp-
but it has always been tha t which is different, apart from and
foreign to the reigning tradition, a singulari ty which b ursts into
the present and twists its course in an u nexpected dire ction .
It is controversial oddness, active opposition . We are seduced
by the new not because of its newness but because of its
differen tness. This differentness is negation-the knife which
splits time in two : before and now.
The very old can be adopted b y modernity if it rej ects the
tradition of the momen t and proposes a differen t one . Conse
crated by the same controversial forces as the new , what is
very old is not a past but a beginning . Our passion for contra
dictions re suscitates i t , breathes life into i t , and makes i t
o u r contemporary . M odern art a nd literature consist o f c on
tinuous discovering of the very old and distant , from the
popular Germanic poetry uncovered by Herder to the Chinese
poetry recreated by Pound , frmn the Orient of Delacroix to
the art of the Sou th Seas so loved by Breton . The appearance
of all these paintings, sculptures, and poems on our aesthetic
horizon marked a break , a change . These hundred- and thou
sand-year-old novelties interrup ted tradition time and time
again ; the history of modern art is linked wi th the resurrection
of the art forms of vanished civilizations. As manifestations of
the aesthetics of surprise, b u t even more as momentary incarna
tions of cri tical negation, the products of archaic art and of
distan t c ivilizations fit naturally into the tradition of d iscon
tinuity . They are among the masks of modernity .
The modern tradition erases d icho tomies between the a ncient
and the contemporary and b e tween the far-distant and the
near-to-h and . The acid dissolving these differences is criticism.
Children of the M ire
Critical passion : excessive, impassioned love of criticism and

its precise devices for disconstructions, but also cri ticis m in
love with i ts object, infatuated with the very thing it d enies. In
love with i tself and at war with i tself, it cannot a ffirm anything
permanent or take any principle as a base , its sole principle
being the nega tion of all principles, perpetual change . The
meaning of this cult will escape us unless we are aware that it is
rooted in a peculiar conception of time . For the Ancie nts,
today repeats yesterday ; for the M oderns, denies it. In the first
case , tim e is seen and felt as a regulating factor,
process in
which the variations and exceptions are actually variations from

and exceptions to the rule ; in the second , the process is a
fabric of irregularities because variations and exceptions are
themselves the rul e . For us time d oes not repeat identi cal
moments or centuries ; each century and each instant is unique,
differen t , o th er.
The tradition of the modern conceals a paradox grea ter than
is hin ted at in the contradiction between ancient and n e w ,
modern a n d traditional . The opposition between the p ast and
the present vanishes because time passes so quickly that the
distinctions among past , present , and fu ture evapora te . We can
speak of a modern tradi tion without contradicting ourselves
becaus the m odern era has eroded , almost to the paint of
disappearance, the an tagonism between the old and the actual,
the new and the traditional. The acceleration of time not only
blurs the division between what has happened and wha t i s
happening_ but also erad icates the differences between o l d age
and you th Our era has exalted y outh and its values with such
frenzy as to m ake of this cui t a superstition, if not a re ligion.
Ye t never before has age overtaken us as rapidly as tod ay.

Our art collections, our poetry an thologies, and our libraries
are full of prematurely aged styles, m ovements, paintings,
sculptures, novels, poems. We feel dizzy : what has j ust happened
already bel ongs to the world of the infini tely remote , while at
the same time the ancient of ancients is infini tely near . We
may conclude that the m odern tradi tion and the contradictory
ideas and images evoked by this notion are the resu l t o f an
even more disturbing phenomenon : the modern era m arks the
accele ra tion of historical time. I f years , m onths, and d ays
actually do not pass more quickly now, a t least m ore t hings
happen in them. A nd m ore things happen at the same time-not
in succession , but simul taneously . Such acceleration p rod uces
fusion : all times and all spaces flow together in one here and
now.
Some may wonder if history really passes more quickly now
tha n before . Who can answer this question? The accelerat ion of
historic time migh t be an illusion ; the changes and convulsi ons
tha t d istress or fill us w i th wonder m ay be far less pro found
and decisive than we think. The Russian Revol ution seemed so
radical a break between past and fu ture that a traveler said :
I have seen the future and i t works. Today we are surp rised by
the persistence of old Russia 's tradi tional features. J oh n Reed's
book recounting the ele ctrifying days of 1 9 1 7 seems to des
cribe a far-di stant pas t ; that of the M arquis of Cousti ne, whose
theme is the bureaucratic and poli ce-ridden world of C zarism , is
up-to-date in m ore ways than one . The Mexican Revol ution
also impells us to doubt history 's accelera tion . I t was a profound
upheava l , whose object was to modernize the coun try ; yet the
most rem arkable fact about con temporary Mexico is the persist
ence of ways of thinking and feeling that belong to the colonial
era, or even the pre-Hispanic world . The same is true o f art
and li terature . During the last cen tury and a half there have
been many changes and aesthetic revolu tions, but one and the
same principle inspired the German and English Romantics,
the French Symbolists, and the cosmopolitan vanguard of the
first half of the twen tie th century. On various occasions
Frederick Schlegel defi ned romantic poetry , love , and irony
in terms not very differen t from those which , a cen tury later,
Andre B reton u sed in speaking abou t the eroticism , imagination,
and humor of the Surrealists. I nfluences? Coincidences?
Neither : merely the persistence of certain ways of thinking,
seeing, a nd feeli ng.
D oubts about the reality of "the acceleration of history" grow
stronger if, instead of turning to the recent past for ex amples,
we compare distant ages or d i fferent civiliza tions. Georges
Dumezil has shown the existence of an ideology comm on to all
Indo-Eu ropean peoples, from I ndia and I ran to the Ce l ti c and
Germanic worlds, an ideology whi ch resisted and still resists
the double erosion of geographic and historical isolation.
Separa ted by thousands of miles and by thousand s of years,
the Indo-Europeans still preserve the remains of a triparti te
conception of the world . I am convinced that something similar
is tru e of the M ongolian p eoples , in Asia as well as in America ;
that world is waiting for a Dumezil to show its profou nd unity.
Even before Benjamin Lee Whorf, who was the first to formu
late systematically the contrast b e tween the mental stru ctures
underlying the Europeans and those of the Hopi , some
A Tra dition against Itself
researchers had noticed the existence and the p ersisten ce of a

qu adripartite vision of the world common to the Ame rican
Indians. But the d i fferences between civilizations hide a secret
unity : man . Cultural and historic differences are the w ork of
a single au thor who changes very litt le ., Human natu re i s no
illusion: it is the consta nt factor that produces the cha nges and
the diversity of cultures, histories, rel igions, arts.
We might conclude that the a cceleration of history is illusory
or, more probably, that the changes merely touch the surface
without altering the d eep reality. Events follow each o ther and
the swell of h istory conceals the und erwater landscape of
motionless valleys and mountains. I n wha t sense , the n , can we
talk o f a mod ern trad ition? The acceleration of history may be
illusory or real - the point legitimately can be question ed-but
the society which invented the expression "the mod ern tradi
tion" is a peculiar one. The phrase implies more than a l ogical
and linguistic contradiction : it expresses that d ramatic condition
of our civilization which seeks its foundatiqn not in the p st or
'
in some immovable principle , but in change . whether w e believe
that social struc tures change ve ry slowly and mental structure s
are invariable , or whether we believe in history and i t s unending
I
transformations, one fact remains: our image of time has

changed . The comparison of our idea o f time with tha t of a
twelfth-century Christian makes the difference immed iately
apparent .
As o u r image of time h a s changed , s o has o u r relation to
tradition 1, Criticism of a tradition begins with the awareness of
belonging to a tradition . Tradi tionalist peoples live immersed
in their past wi thout questioning i t . Unaware of their t raditions,
they live with and in the m . Once a man realizes that he belongs
to a tradition , he knows implicitly that he is different from
that trad ition ; sooner or later this knowledge impells him to
question , examine , and some times deny i t . Our age is d istin
guished from other epochs and other societies by the image we
have made of tim e . F or us time is the sub stance of history,
time unfolds in history. The meaning of " the modern tradition"
emerges more clearly : i t is an expression of our histori c con
sciousness. It is a criticism of the past , and it is an a ttemp t,
repeate d several times throughout the last two centuri es, to
found a tradition on the only principle immune to cri ticism ,
because i t is the condition and the consequence of criticism:
change, history .
The relation between past, present , and fu ture differs i n each
civilization . In primitive societies the temporal archetype,
model for the present and fu ture , is the p ast --not the recent
past , b u t an immemorial p ast lying bey ond all pasts, at the
beginning of the beginning . Like a wellspring, this past of pasts
flows constantly , runs i nto and becomes part of the present ;
i t is the only actuality which really cou nts. Social life is not
histori c b u t ritualistic; it is made up not of a successio n of
changes but of the rhythmic repetition of the timeless past.
Always present, this past protects society from change by serv
ing as a model for imitation and by being periodically actualized
in ritual. The past has a double na ture : it is an immutable time ,
impervious to change ; i t is not what happened once , b u t what
always h appens. The past escapes both accident and contin
gen cy ; a l th ough it is time, it is also the negation of time. I t
dissolves the con trad ictions be tween what happened y esterday

and wha t is happening today . I nsensible to change , it is the
norm : every th ing must happen as in the timeless past.
No thing cou ld be more opposed to our concep tion o f time
than that of the primitive s ; for us time is the bearer of change ,
for them the agent suppressing i t . More than a category of
time, the past of prim itive man is a reality beyond time : the
original beginning. A l l societies except ours have imagined
a place beyon d , where time reposes reconciled with itself. I t no
longer changes because , having become immobile transparency ,
i t has ceased to flow , or because, flowing endlessly , i t remains
identical to itself. The principle of identi ty triumph s : contra
dictions disappear because perfect time exists outside time.
For p rimitive peoples , as opposed to Christians or M uslims, the
atemporal model exists not a fterward but before , not at the
end of time but at the beginning of the beginning . I t is not the
state at which we must arrive when time is abolished , b u t wha t
we must i m i tate from the beginning .
Primi tive soci e ty views with dread the variations imp lied by
the passage of time ; changes are considered ominous. What
we call history is a faul t , a fal l . Oden tal and Medi terranean
civilizations, like those of pre-Colum bian Ameri ca , regarded
history with the same misgivings, but did not deny i t so radi
cally . The past of the primi tives is always moti onless a nd always
presen t ; the time of Oriental and Medi terranean cul tures un folds
in circles and in spirals : the ages of the worl d . A surprising
transformation of the timeless past, i t elapses, is subj e c t to
change, becomes tempora l . The past is the prim ordial seed
sprou ting, grow ing, exhausting i tself, and dying- to be born
10
again. The model is still the past before all eras, the happy time
of the beginning, governed by the harm ony of heaven and
earth . B u t i t is a past which possesse s the same properties as
plan ts and living beings ; i t is an animated substan ce , that
changes, and, above all , dies. History is a debasem ent o f original
time , a slow, inexorable process of decadence ending in death.
Recurrence is the remedy for change and ex tinction ; the past
waits at the end of each cycJe . The past i s an age to co me .
The fu ture offers a double image : the end of t ime and its
reb irth , the corrup tion of the archetypal past and i ts resurrec
tion . The end of the cycle is the restoration of the orig inal
past- and the beginning of the inevitable downfall. Th is con
cep tion d iffers markedly from those of th e Christians and the
moderns. For the Christians, perfect time is eterni ty - time
abolished , history annu lled ; for the moderns, perfection, if it
exists, c an be found only in the fu ture . Also, our fu ture
resembles neither the past nor the presen t ; it is the region of
the unexpected , whereas the fu ture of the ancient Med i te rran
eans and Orientals runs into the past .
The Western \Vorld has a name for this primordial time which
is the model of all times, the age of harmony between m an
and nature and be tween m an and men : the Golden Age . I n
other civilizations- the Chinese , the Mesa-American -j ad e , not
gol d , sym bolized the harmony between th e social sche me of
humans and that of nature . 1 ade embodies the ever-returning
green of na ture , just as gold bears wi tness to a materialization
of the light of the sun . Jade and gold are double sym bols,
like every thing which expresses the deaths and resurrections of
cyclical time. In one phase time is condensed and transmu ted
11
into a hard , precious substance , as if it wished to escap e from

change and its d ebasement ; in the other, stone and metal
become soft , are again time, and , turned into vegetable and
animal excrement and rottenness, disintegrate. But disintegra
tion and putrefaction are also resurrection and fertility : the
ancient M exicans put a jade bead on the mou ths of their dead.
The ambiguity of gold and jade reflects the ambiguit y of
cyclical time : the temporal archetype exists in time and adopts
the form of a past which returns-only to move away again.
Green or golden , the happy time is a time of concord , a con
juncti on of times, lasting only a mome n t . It is a true a ccord : the
condensation of time in a drop of jade or gold is followed by
dispersion and corruption. Recurrence saves us from the cha nges
of history only to submit us to them more h arshly. They cease
to be accident, fall , or error, and become the successive moments
of an inex orable process. Nor d o the gods escape the cycle.
From the Egyp tians and the Greeks to the Aztecs, all m y tholo
gies tell the story of the birth , d eath , and resurrection of the
gods. In a Nahuatl poem Que tzalcoatl disappears on the hori
zon , "where the waters of the sea meet those of the heavens. "
He will reappear on the same horizon, where twiligh t b ecomes
dawn .
I s there no way to step out of the circle of time? Fro m the
beginning of her civiliza tion, I ndia imagined a beyond which is
not properly time bu t i ts negation : motionless being id entical
to itself (Brahman) or an equ ally motionl ess vacuity (N irvana).
Brahman never changes , and nothing can be said abou t it,
except that it is ; about Nirvana nothing can be said , n o t even
that it is not. In both cases we are dealing with a reality bey ond
l2
time and language , a reality adm itting of no names other than

those of universal negation , for it is neither this nor that, nor
what lies beyond. I t is neither this nor tha t , and yet it is. I n dian
civilization d oes not break cyclical time ; without d enying its
empirical reality , it dissolves and converts it into an insubstan tial
phantasmagori a . This criticism of time , which reduces change
to an illusion, is another, more radical way, of opposing history .
The timeless past of primi tive man becomes temporal, is made
incarnat e , and becomes the cyclical time of the Med iterranean
and East ern civiliza tions ; I nd ia d issolves cycles : they are literally
the dream of Brahman. Each time the god wakes, the d ream
dissolves . The duration of this dream terrifies me ; the age in
which w e now live-rather the dream of this age , characterized
by the u nj u st possession of wealth -will last four hund red and
thirty-two thousand years. And it appalls m e even m ore to
know that every time the god awakens he is condemned to fall
asleep again and t o dream the same d ream . This vast, circular
dream , at once monstrous and m onotonous, is unreal for him
who dreams it but real for us who are dreamt. The d anger of
this metaphysical radicalism is that man cannot escape the
universal negation . B etween history with its unreal cycles and
a colorless real i ty devoid of flavor and attributes, what remains
for man? Both are uninhabi table (see Note I ).
India d ispelled cycles ; Christianity severed them . Be fore the
moment of illumination G au tama recalls his past lives and
sees , in o ther universes and other cosmic eras, other G autamas
disappearing in vacu i ty . Christ came to earth only once. The
world in which Christianity propagated i t self was haun ted by a
belief in i t s inevitable d ecadence , and men were convi n ce d they
13
were living the end of a cycle . At times this idea was e xpressed
in almost Christian term s : "The earthly elements will be dis
solved and all will be destroyed so that all may be crea ted anew
in i ts first innocence . " The first part of this sentence b y Seneca
correspond s to what the Christians believed and hoped, that
the end of the world was near. I t is very possible that o ne of the
reasons for the great number of conversions to the new religion
was the belief in the imminence of the end . Christianit y offered
an answer to the threat which loomed over mankind . W ould so
many have been converted if they had known that the world
would last several mi llenniums more? Saint Augustine thought
that the first age of human ity, from the Fall of Adam to the
sacri fi ce of Christ, had lasted a lit tle less than six thousand years,
and that the last age , ou rs, would endure only a few ce nturies.
The circular time of the pagan philosophers implied th e re turn
of a golden age , bu t this universal regeneration , apart from
bei ng only a respite in the inex orable movement toward deca
dence, was not synonymous w i th individual salvation . Christi
ani ty promised personal salvation, so its triumph prod u ced
an essen tial change : the protagoni st of the cosmic drama was
no longer the world but man-or, rather, Everyman. H i story's
center of gravity changed . The circular time of the pagans
was infini te and impersonal ; Ch ristian time was finite and
personal.
Augustine refu tes the idea of cycles wi th curious arguments.
He thinks i t absurd that rational souls do not remember having
lived all those lives of which the pagan philosophers sp oke ;
and he thinks i t even more absurd to postulate at one time
wisdom and the eternal re turn : "How can the immortal soul
14
which has gained wisdom be subm itted to these ceaseless migra

tions between an illusory bea ti tude and a real unhappi ness? "
The image of circular time becomes a demoniacal design , and
cen turie s later will make Raimu ndo Lull say "Grief in he ll
is like the movement of the circl e . " Finite and personal ,
Christian time is irreversib le. I t is n o t tru e , says Saint Augustine,
that for countless cycles Plato is condemned to teach, in a
school i n A thens called the Academy , the same doctrines to the
same pupils: "Only once d id Christ die for our sins, and rise
from the d ead , and he will die no more . " When i t brok e the
cycles and in troduced the idea of a fini te and irreversib le time,
Christianity accentuated the "o therness" of time ; it made
manifest that property which makes time break with i tse lf,
divide and separate itself, become some thing o ther and a lways
differe n t . Adam 's F all severed the eternal present of Paradise :
the beginning of sequential time i s the beginning of sep aration .
Time , continually splitting, con tinually repeats the original
break, the break from the beginning : the dividing of the e ternal
present into a yesterday, a tod ay, and a tomorrow , each d iffer
ent, unique. This continual change is the m ark of imperfection ,
the sign of the Fall. Finiteness, i rreversibility , and o therness
are manife stations of imperfection. Each moment is u nique and
distinct becau se it is separate , c u t off from u nity. History is a
synonym for Fall.
Contrasting with the he terogeneity of h istoric time is the
unity of the time which comes a fter all time . I n e terni ty con
tradictions end , every thing is reconciled , and in reconciliation
achieves perfection, i ts first and last unity . The coming of the
I
eternal p resent, after the Last J udgment, is the death o f death-
15
A Trad ition against Itsel f
the death of change . The affirmation of Christian eternity is

no less terrifying than the negation of Ind ia . In the third circle
of hell, where gluttons are su ffering in a l ake of excrement,
Dante meets a fellow countryman, a wre tched man ca lled
Ciacco. After prophesying new civic calamities in Florence
reprobates have the gift of second sight-and asking D ante
to rem ind people of him when he re turns to earth , poor Ciacco
sinks under the fil thy water. "He will not come out again ,"
says Virgil, "until the angelic trumpet sounds," which will be at
the last j udgment. Dante asks his guide if after the "great
sentence" the a ffl iction of this soul will be greater or m ilder.
And Virgil replies: He will su ffer m ore because in a sta te of
greater perfection, both bliss and pain must be greater. A t the
end of all time every thi ng and every being will be more com
pletely what they are : fullness of j oy in p aradise corre sponds
exactly and point by point to full ness of suffering in h e l l .
The timeless past of the primitive, cyclical time, B ud dhist
vacuity, dissolution of opposites in B rahman or in the Christian
eterni ty : the gamu t of conceptions of time is i mmense, b u t
thi s variety m ay be reduced to a single principle. All th ese
archetypes, d ifferent though they may be , are attem p t s to
annul or, at least, minimize change. They confront the p lurality
of rea l time w i th the uni ty o f a n ideal time , the othern ess of
time with the identity of a time beyond time. The m o re rad ical
attempts such as B uddhist vacuity and Christian ontology
postul ate conceptions in which the o therness and the c on tra
diction inherent in the passage of time disappear altogether,
replaced by a timeless time. O ther temporal archetypes tend
toward the harmonizing of con traries withou t suppressing
16
them completely, either by the conjunction of times in an

immemorial past which con tinuously becomes the present, or
by the idea of the cycles or ages of the worl d . Our era breaks
abrup tly with these ways of thought . Having i nheri ted th e
unilinear and irreversible time of Christianity , i t adopts the
Christian opposition to cyclical conceptions b u t , simul taneously ,
denies the Christian archetype a n d affirms o n e that negates all
the ideas and i m ages of time which m an has made for himself.
The modern age is the first to e x alt change and convert i t into a
fou ndation . Differen ce , separation, otherness, pluralit y , novelty,
evolu tio n , revolu tion, history -all these words can be condensed
in one : fu ture . Not past nor e ternity, not time which is but
time which is not yet and which always will be to come : this is
our archetype .
A t the end of the eigh teenth centu ry a M oslem Indian, Mirza
Abii Taleb Kha n , visi ted E ngland . On his return he wro te
about his impressions. Am ong the things which surprised him
most- together with the mechanical advances, the state of
science , the art of conversation , and the English girls , ( "e arthly
cypre sses whi ch suppress all d esire to rest in the shade of the
trees of Paradise " ) -one finds the idea of progress : "The English
have very strange opinions as to what p erfection means. They
insist that it is an ideal quality b ased en tirely on comp ari son ;
they say that humanity has risen gradually from the state of
savagery to the exalted dignity of the phil osopher New ton , but
tha t , far from having reached perfection, it i s possible that in
fu ture eras phil osophers will regard the discoveries of Newton
wi th the same disdain with which we now regard the rustic state
of the arts among the savages. " For Abii Taleb our perfection
17
A Trad ition against Itself
is ideal and relative . I t d oes not have nor wll i t have rea l i ty ; it
will always be insufficient and incomplete . Our perfection is
not that which is, but tha t which will be. The ancien ts feared
the future and invented formulas to exorcise i t ; we would
give our lives to kn ow i ts shining face- a face we will n ever see . ;
!
18
In every socie ty generations weave a web of repe tition s and

variations. I n one way or another, explicitly or taci tly , the
"q uarrel of the Ancients and the M oderns" is renewed in each
cycle
/There are as many "modern period s" as there are h is
torical epochs. Nevertheless, no socie ty but ours has actually

called i tsel f "modern . " .If moderni ty is simply a conse que nce of
the passage of time , to' name oneself "modern " is to re sign
oneself to losing it very quickly . What will the modern era be
called in the future? Perhaps to re tard the i nevi table erosion
which obliterates every thi ng, other societies decided to be
known by the name of a god , a belief, or a desti ny: I slam ,
Christiani ty, Middle Kingdom - these names refer t o an immu
table princip le or, at least, to stab le ideas and images. Every
society settles on the name which is to become i t s foundation
stone , d e fining itse l f i n its choice and a ffirming i tself w ith
respect to others. Naming d ivides the world in two: Christians
and Pagans, Muslims and I n fidels, civilized men and barbarians,
Toltecs and Chichimecans, ourselves and o thers .. Our society
also d ivides the world in two : the modern versus the old: This
division works wi thin society -where it crea tes th e d ichotomy
between m odern and trad i tional , new and old-and ou tside i t .
19
The Revolt of the Fu ture
Every time the Europeans and their North American d escend

ants have encountered other cultures and civilizations, they
have called them backward. This is not the first time a race or a
civilization has imposed its forms on others, but i t is certainly
the first time one has set up as a universal idea l , not a changeless
principle , but change itsel f. The M uslim or Christian based the
alien's inferiority on a difference of fai th ; for the Greeks,
Chinese , or Tol tecs, he was inferior because he was a b arbarian,
a Chichimecan. Since the eighteenth century Africans or
Asiatics have been inferior because they are not modern.
The Western world has identified i tself with change and time,
and there is no modernity other than that of the West . There
are hardly any barbarians, I n fidels or Gentiles left ; rather,
the new Heathen Dogs can be counted in the millions, bu t they
are called "underdeveloped p eople s . "
"Underd eveloped"- this adjective belongs to the anemic and
castra ted l anguage of the United Nations. The word has no
precise meaning in the fields of anthropology and history ; it is
not a scientific but a bureaucra ti c term . Despite its vagueness,
or perhaps because of i t , it is a favorite of economists and

sociologists. I ts am biguity masks two pseudo-ideas: th e first
takes for gran ted that only one civil ization exists, or th at
diffe re n t civilizations may be reduced to a single mode l
modern Western civil ization ; the second affirms that changes
of societies and cultures are linear and progressive and that
they can be measured . The tendency to identify the m odern
age w ith civilization, and both with the West , has become so
widespread that m any people in Latin America talk about our
/
cultural underdevelopment. How can a culture be und er-
20
developed?. Is Shakespeare more "'developed " tha n Dante, and

is Cervantes "underdeve loped " compared with Hemingway?
I t is true that in the sphere of science there is an accumulation
of knowledge , and in this sense one may speak of developmen t.
But this accumulation of knowledge in no way implies that
tod ay 's men of science are more "'developed " than yes terday's.
I t can be argued that at least when we speak of technology
and i ts social consequences, the concep t of developme n t is
j ustified . I t is precisely in this sense that the concept seems to
me equivocal and d angerous. The principles on which tech
nology i s based are universal ; their application is not. The
unthinking adoption of North American technology in Mex ico
has produced no end of m isfortunes and a p rogressive degrada
tion of our way of life and our culture . This is not nostalgic
obscurantism ; the only real obscurantists are those wh o cultivate
the superstition of progress at any price . I know that we
cannot escape ; we are condemned to "development ," but let
us make the penalty less inhuma n .
Developmen t , progress, modernity-when d i d the modern
era begin? Among the many ways we m ay read the great books
of the past, there is one which I prefer : to look in them not for
what we are, but for the thing which denies what we are . I
return t o Dante, p recisely because he is the least up-to-da te of
the great poets of our trad ition. Dante and Virgil pass through a
huge expanse of flaming tombstones ; i t i s the six th circle of Hell
where the Epicurean and materialist philosophers are burning.
In one grave they meet a Floren tine patrician, Farinata d egli
Uberti, who is enduri ng the torment of fire wi th courage.
Farinata foretells Dante's exile , and then, answering a q uestion
21
The Revolt of the Futu re
by Dante, says that even the gi ft of second sight will be taken

from him "When the door of the fu ture is closed . " After the
Last Judgment there will be nothing to predict beca use nothing
will happen. The closing down of time, the end of the future.
Whenever I read this passage I seem to hear a voice no t only
from another age but from another world . And in fa ct it is
another world which pronounces these dread fu l word s . The
theme of the death of God has become a commonplace, but the
idea that one day the gates of the fu ture will close- so metimes
I laugh at this idea ; other times it makes me tremble.
We conceive of time as a continuous flow , an u nend ing
movement toward the future ; i f the future is closed , time stops.
This idea is unbearable, intolerable. I t offends our moral sensi
bili ties by mocking our fai th in th e perfectibility of the species,
and it offend s our reason by d enying our belief in evolution
and progress. In Dante's world perfection is synonymous with
a state beyond change and imm obili ty , the plenitude o f being.
Removed from the changing and finite time of history , every
thing i s what it is for ever and ever. Such an eternal present
seems to us un thinkable and impossi ble; the present is by
defini tion the instantaneous, and the instantaneous is the
purest , m ost intense form of tim e . If the in tensity of the moment
becomes fixed in duration, we face a logical impossibil ity which
is also a nightmare. For Dante the fixed present of etern i ty
is the height of perfection ; for us it is d amnation, since it places
us in a state which , if not death , is not life e i ther. A ki ngd om
of men buri ed alive, not in tombs of stone but in walls of frozen
seconds. This perfection is a denial of existence as we have
thought , felt, and loved it-as a perpetual possibility of being,
22
movement, advance toward the changeable land of the fu ture .

There in th e future , where being is a prescience o f being, is
our paradise. The modern era begins at the moment man dares
accomp lish an act which would h ave made Dante and Farinata
degli Uberti tremble and laugh at the same time : open ing the
gates of the fu ture .
Modernity is an exclusively Western concept which d oes not
appear in any other civilization . Other civilizations postulate
temporal images and archetypes from which it is impossible to
deduce our idea of time, even as a nega tion. The Budd hists'
vacuity , the Hindus' undifferentiated being, the cyclical time of
Greeks, Chinese, and Azte cs, and the archetypal past of primi
tive man h ave no relation to our.idea of time. M edieval
Christian society conceived of time as a finite process, con
secutive and irreversible ; when time is used up-or, as the poet
says, when the door of the fu ture i s shu t-an e ternal presen t
will reign. I n the finite time of history, in the h ere and n ow,
man gambles with his eternal life . Ou r modern idea of titne
could appear only within this concep tion of irreversible time ;
and it could appear only a s a cri t icism of Christian e ternity.
True, in the I slamic cui ture the temp oral archetype is analagous
to that of Christianity ; but there , for a reason which w ill
appear hartly, criticism of e ternity could not possibly come
abou t . (A nd the very essen ce of m odernity is the cri ticism of
eternity : modern time is critical time .
History is conflict and every society is torn by soci a l , p olitical,
and religious contradictions. Societies live and die because of
them . One function of the temporal archetype is to offer an
ideal and timele ss solution to these contradi ctions and thus
23
preserve the socie ty from change and death . Therefore , every

idea of time is a metaphor inven ted not by a poet but by a race.
But these great collective images of time are converted i n to
concep ts by theologians and philosophers. Passing through the
sieve of reason and cri ticism , they become versions, m ore or
less well-defined , of the principle of identi ty . S ome tim es the
elimina tion of opposi tions is radical : Buddh ist criticism gets rid
of the terms " I " and "the world ," affirming universal vacui ty ,
an absolute abou t which nothing can be said because i t is
empty of everything, including, says a Mahayana Su tra , i ts own
emp tiness. In other cases, contrary elemen ts are not removed
but reconciled and harmonized , as in ancient China's philosophy
of tim e . The possibility that the con tradiction will explode,
destroying the system , is both in tellectual and real. If logical
coheren ce collapses, society loses its foundations and falls.
Hence the closed and self-suffi cient nature of these archetypes,
their claim to invulnerabil i ty , and their resistance to change.
A society may change its archetype-move , perhaps, from
polytheism to m onotheism , or from cyclical time to th e finite
and irreversible time of I slam or Christianity-but the arche
types are neither changed nor transformed . The single ex ception
to this universal rule is Western society .
The Christian dichotomy results from the dual legacy of
Judaic monotheism and p agan philosophy . The Greek idea of
Being-in any of its versions, from the Presocratics to the
Epicureans, S toics, and Neoplatonists-is incompatible with the
Judaic idea of a personal God who created the universe.
Christian philosophy was deeply aware of this contrad i c tion .
I t was its central theme from the Church fathers onward , and
24
Scholasticism tried to resolve it with an on to logy of ex traordi

nary subtl e ty . The modern age resul ted from the impossibil i ty
of solving i t.: The disp u te between reason and revelation also
tore the Arab world apart, but there the victory went to revela
tion: the death of philosophy and not, as in the West, the death
of God . E ternity's triumph shu t the gates of the fu ture , and
identity won an absolute victory : Allah i s Allah . The Wes tern
world escaped tau tology only to fall into contrad iction.
The m odern age began when the conflict between G od and
Being, reason and revelation was considered insoluble. Con
trary to what happened in Islam , reason grew at the expense of
divinity . God is one and indivisible (He d oes not tolera te
otherness excep t as the sin of non-being ) ; m eanwhile reason
tends to split off from i tself. Every time i t reflects on i t self, i t
d ivides i n half; every time i t contemplates itself, it d iscovers
it is oth er. Reason aspires to unity b u t , unlike divinity , neither
comes t o rest nor identifies i tsel f with unity ; thus, the Trinity,
which combines unity and plurality, is a mystery reason cannot
penetrate. If unity becomes reflective , it becomes other: i t
perceives i tself a s otherness. By sid ing w i th reason, the West
conde1nned i tself to be always o ther, and to perpetuate i tse l f
only b y constant self-negation.
I n the metaphysical systems d evised by the modern age in i ts
early days, reason appears as a sufficien t principle : i t i s i t s own
foundation and a found ation for the world . But these systems
were replaced by others in which reason is first and foremost
criticism . Reason turned i n upon i tself ceased to create systems.
It traced its limits, judged i tself, and , by so judging, destroyed
i tself as a guiding pri nciple. In this self-de struction reason found
25
a new cornerstone . Cri tical reason , our rul ing principle , rules in
a peculiar way : rather than build ing systems invulnerable to
criticism, it acts as sel f-critic. It governs insofar as i t u n folds and
sets itsel f up as the obje ct of analysis, d oubt, and negation. I t
is not a temple or a stronghold , b u t a n open space , a p u blic
square and a road , a discussion, a method-a road continual ly
making and unmaking itself, a method whose only principle
is scru t iny of all principles. Cri t ical reason , by its very rigor,
accentuates temporality . Nothing is permanent ; reason becomes
identified with change and otherness. We are ruled not by
ident ity , with its enormous and monotonou s tautologies, but
by otherness and contradiction , the dizzying m anifesta tions
of criticism . In the past the goal of criticism was tru th ; in the
modern age truth is criticism. Not an e ternal tru th , bu t the
truth of change.
The contradiction of Christian society was the opposition of
reason and revelation, the Being which is thought thinking
itself, and the God who is a creating persona . That of the modern
age appears in the attempts to build systems based not on an
a temporal principle but on the principle of change . Hegel called
his philosophy a cure for division . But if the modern e ra is the
schism of Christian society and if our very foundation , critical
reason, continually divides itself, how can we be cured of
division without denying ourselves and our found ation? The
problem of the West was how t o bring opposing elements into
some kind of unity w ithout eliminating them . In other civiliza
tions, resolving the contradictions of opposites was the first
step toward a unifying affirmation. In the Catholic world the
ontology of the degrees of being also offered the possi bility
26
Children o f the Mire
of attenua ting oppositions to the point of making them dis

appear a lmost completely. Q i_<Ilectic undertakes the same
enterprise i n the mod ern age , but does so through recourse to
parad ox -making negation the unifying bridge betwee n terms.
I t claims' to end antagonisms, not by redu cing but by aggravating
oppositions. Kant had called d ialectic "the logic of illusions,"
but Hegel insisted that it was p ossible to eliminate the philo
sophical scandal known as the Kantian "thing in itself," thanks
to the negativity of the concept . One need not agree w ith
Kant to notice tha t , even i f Hegel was righ t, dialectic abolishes
contradictions only to have them reappear immed iately The
last great philosophical system of the West oscillates between
speculative delirium and critical reason ; it is a thought which
sets itself up as a system only to split in two , curing schism by
schism . A t one extreme of the m odern age are Hegel and his
materialistic followers, at the o ther, the criti cism of all systems,
from empiricism to N ie tszche and modern l i nguistic and ana
lytical philosophy. This opposition is the raison d 'etre of the
Western world-i ts origin and i ts future death .
The m odern age i s a separation. I use "separation" i n i t s most
obvious sense : to move away from something, to cu t oneself
off. The modern age begins as a breaking away from Christian
society. Faithfu l to its origins, i t is a con t inual breaking away,
a ceaseless splitting apar t ; each generation repeats the act by
which we were founded , and in th is repetition we deny and
renew ourselves . Separation unites u s with the original m ove
ment of our society, and severance throws us back on ourselves.
As if it were one of those tortures imagined by Dante (but
which is for us a stroke of luck : our reward for living i n history),
27
we search for ourselves in otherness, find ourselves there, and

as soon as we become one with this other whom we invent and
who is only our reflection, we cut ourselves off from this
phantom being, and run again in search of ourselves, chasing
our own shad ow . This u nending m ovement forward , always
forward -toward what we do not know -we call progress .
Our idea of time as continuous change not only breaks with
the med ieval Christian archetype, but is a new combination
of its element s : the horizontal time, from the Fall of A d am to
the Last Judgment, and the e ternal present which follows.
The first element, finite time , becomes the almost infinite time
of natural evol u tion and of history , but retains two properties :
it is unrepeatable and i t is sequential . The modern age rej ects
cyclic} ! i e in the same trenchant way Augustine d id : things
happen only once , they are unrepeatable. The main character

of this temporal drama is no l onger the individual soul but
the collective entity, the human species. The second element,
perfection embodied in eternity , becomes an attribute of
history . Thus, for the first time, a value is placed on change.
Beings and things do not reach the true fullness of the ir reality
and p erfection in the other time of the other world bu t in the
present time-a time which is a fleeting and not an e te rnal
present. History is our path to perfection. By virtue of its own
logic, the modern age stressed not the actual reality of every
man bu t the ideal reality of socie ty and the spe cies. If the acts
and works of m en ceased to have religious significance , they
took on a superindividual coloration ; their significance was
primarily historical and social. This subversion of Chri stian
values was also a conversion. Human time no longer revolves
28
Children o f t h e Mire
around the motionless sun of e ternity ; instead it postu lates

a perfection insid e , not ou tside , history . The species, not the
individual, is the subject of this new perfe ction ; it can be
reached not by fu sion with God but through participa tion in
earthly, historical action. Perfection, regarded by scholasticism
as an attribute of eternity, is introduced into time ; consequently ,
the contemplative life is rejected as the highest human ideal,
and the supreme value of temporal action is affirmed . Man's fate
is not union with God, but with history . Work replaces peni
tence , progress gra ce , and politics religion .
The m od ern age considers itself revolutionary . I n many ways
it i s ; the first and most obvious is semantic : the m odern world
has changed the meaning of the word revolu tio n . 'The ori ginal
\
meaning -the turning of the worlds and the stars-has another,

now the more usual, placed beside i t : a violent breaking with the
old order and the establishment of a new, more j ust, or m ore
rational order. The turning of the stars wa s a v isible manifesta
tion of circular tim e ; in i ts new m eaning, revolu tion be came
the most perfect expression of seq uentia l , linear, and irreversible
time . One implied the eternal return of the past ; the other the
destruction of the past and the building of a new socie ty . Bu t
the first meaning d oe s not disappear completely ; i t undergoes
yet another conversion . In its m odern meaning , revolu tion
expresses with m aximum cohere n ce the concept of his tory as
inescapable change and progress. If society stops evolv ing and
grows stagnan t, a revolution breaks out . If revolutions are
necessary , history is invested with the necessity of cyclical time.
This is a mystery as insoluble as that of the Trinity, since
revolu tions are expressions of irreversib le time and the re fore
29
manifestations of critical reason . The ambigui ty of the meaning

of revolution reveals the mythic traces of cyclical time and
the geometric traces of cri ticism , the oldest antiqui ty and the
newest novelty. It is fate and it is freed om .
The great revolu tionary change was the revol t of the future.
In Chris tian society the fu ture was under sentence of d ea th ,
for the triumph o f the eternal present , following the Last
J udgment, was the end of the future . The modern age inverts
the term s . If man is history and only realizes himself in history,
i f history i s time l ooking forward and the fu ture i s the chosen
place for perfection , if perfection is relative in relation to the
future and absolute in relation to the past-then the fu ture
become s the center of the temporal tri ad . I t is a magn e t for the
presen t , a touchstone for the past. I t is eternal like the fix ed
prese nt of Chri stianity . Although our future is a proje ction of
history, it is beyond history , far from change and cha n ce . Like
the eternity of the Christians, it lies on the other side of time;
our fu ture i s simultaneously the projection of sequential t ime
and its negation. M odern man is pushed toward the fu ture with
the same violence as the Christian was pushed toward heaven
or hel l .
Christian eternity w a s the solu tion to all contradictions and
anguish , the end of history and of time ; our fu ture, though
the repository of perfection , is neither resting-place nor end ; on
the contrary, it i s a con tinuous beginning, a permanen t m ove
ment forward . Our future is a paradise/inferno : paradise because
it is the land of desire, inferno because it is the home of dis
satisfaction. From one point of view our perfe ction is always
relative ; from another it is unattainable and untouchab le.
30
Chil dren of the M ire
The f ture , the promised land o f history, is an inaccessible

realmJ We may apply to our own temporal archetype the cri ticism which the modern world makes of Christian eternity and
tha t which Christianity brough t to bear agains t the circular
time of an tiquity. 1 The overevalua tion of change entail s the
'
overevaluation of the fu ture : a time which is n o t .

I s modern l iterature modern? I ts modernness is amb iguous :
the conflict between poetry and the modern world s tarts with
the pre-Romantics and continues until today. I shall try to
describe this conflict, not through its whole evolution - 1 am
not a literary historian -but by stressing the momen ts and works
which show i t m ost clearly . I f this m ethod seems arbi trary, I
claim only that I am not being gra tuitously arbitrary . M y views
are those of a Hispano-American poe t ; this is not a detached
dissertation but an exploration of my origins, an indire ct
attempt at self-de fini tio n . My refl e ctions belong to what
Baudelaire called "partial cri ticism , " the only kind he con
s!dered valid .
I tried to defi ne the modern age as an age of cri ticism , b orn
from a negation. This negation shows i tself with impressive
clarity i n our image of time. Christiani ty postulated the aboli
tion of the fu ture by conceiving e ternity as the place of perfec
tion . M od ernity begins as a criticism of Christian eternity. I ts
criticism recombined the elements embodied in the Christian
idea of tim e ; the values of heaven and hell were transferred
to earth and grafted onto history . E tern i ty was abolish ed ; the
fu ture was en throned in its p lace . Modernity sees itself ruled
by the pri n ciple of change : criticism . This criticism, called
31
h istorical change , adopts two forms : evolution and rev olu tion.
Both have the same meaning : progress ; both are history and
can be dated .
Critical negation encompasses both art and li terature : artisti c
values are seen as separa te from re ligious values. Literature
declares its independence : the poeti c , the artistic, the bea u tifu l
come to b e self-su fficient values. The independence of artistic
values led to the concept of art as object , which in turn led
to a d ou ble invention : art criticism and museums . I n the li terary
sphere, too, modernity ex pressed i tself in a cult of the "object " :
the poe m , the novel , the play. This trend began i n the Ren ais
sance and gained strength in the seventeenth century , bu t only
as we approach the modern age do p oets fu lly realize the nature
of this idea : the writing of a poem implies the constru ction
of a separate, sel f-sufficient reality . In this way the cri tical
spiri t is embodied wi thin the creative process. This is not sur
prising, apparently : modern litera ture , as befits a cri tical age ,
is a cri tical li terature . But the m odernness of modern p oe try
seems paradoxical when observed closely. In many of its most
violent and characteristic works- think of the trad ition which
runs from the R omantics to the Surrealists-modern li terature
passionately rejects the modern age . In another of its m ost
persisten t tendencies, embracing the novel as well as lyric
poetry-that which culminates in a M al larme or a Joyce-our
literature is an equally passionate and all-encompassing criticism
of itself. Criticism of the subject of literature : bourgeois society
and its values ; cri ticism of literature as an obj e c t : langu age and
its meanings. In both these ways modern literature denies
i tself and , by so doing, affirms, confirms , its modernness.
32
Children of t h e Mire
I f modern literature begins as criticism of modernity , the

figure in whom this paradox becomes incarnate is R ou sseau . In
his work the age which is beginning- the age of progress,
inventions, and the d evelopment of capitalist economy -dis
covers o ne of its foundations and at the same time finds itself
bitterly attacke d . I n the novels of Jean Jacques Rousseau
and his followers, the continuous oscillation between p rose and
poetry becomes m ore and more violen t , to the advantage not
of prose but of poetry. Wi thin the novel, prose and poe try
j oi n battle and this battle is the essence of the novel. The
triumph of prose converts the novel into a psychologfcal, social,
or anthropological d ocument ; the triumph of poetry transforms
it into a poem . I n both cases it ceases to be a n ovel . In order to
exist the novel must be a marriage of prose and poetry , w ithout
being entirely one or the other. In this difficult union prose
represents the m odern element : criticism , analysis. From
Cervantes onward , prose seems gradually to win out , but at the
end of the eighteenth century , a sudden earthquake wipes out
the geometry of reason , a mist cloud s the verbal glass. A new
force , sensibility , upsets the constru ctions of reason . N ot a new
force , bu t rather a very old one , it predates reason and history
itself. Against the new and the m odern , against history and its
dates , R ousseau opposes sensibility. It was a return to our
origins, to the beginning of beginnings : sensibility lies beyond
history and dates.
The R omanti cs turned sensibility into passion . Sensibility
is an agreement with the natural world , passion a transgression
of the social order. B oth are Na ture , humanized Nature ; both
are of the body. Al though the passions of the flesh occupy a
33
central p lace in eighteenth-century literature , i t is only with the

pre-Roman tics and Romantics that the body begins to speak .
I t speaks a language made up of dreams, symbols, and meta
phors, a strange pact of the sacred with the profane and of the
sublime with the obscene. This is the language of poetry, not
of reason. It is rad ically d i fferen t from that of the writers of the
Enlightenmen t . I n the M arqu is d e Sad e 's work , the freest and
most daring of this period , the body does not speak, alth ough
this wri ter's only theme is the body and i ts peculiarities and
aberrations. Philosophy speaks through these twisted b od i es.
Sad e is not a passionate writer; his raptures are intellec tual
and his real passion is for cri ticism . He is not excited by the
postures of the bodies, bu t by the rigor and brilliance of
their dialectic. The eroticism of the other libertine philosophers
of the eighteenth century is not as bou ndless as Sade's, but
it is no less cold and rational . It is philosophy, not passion . The
conflict continues into our t ime : D . H . Lawrence and Bertrand
Russell fought aga inst Anglo-Saxon puritanism , but no d oubt
Lawren ce fou !l d R ussell's attitude to the body cynica l , a nd
the latter fou nd Lawrence ' s irrational . The same contrad iction
exists between the Surrealists a nd the supporters of sexual
freedom . For the Surrealists erotic freedom was synonymous
wi th imagination and passi on , while for the others i t i s only
a rational solu tion to the problem of the physical relat ionship
of the sexes. Georges B ataille believed that transgression was
the condition, even the essence , of eroticism ; the new sexual
morality believes that i f prohib itions are removed or a ttenuated ,
erotic transgression will d isappear or be lessened . Jllak e p u t
_
it this way : "Both read the Bible d a y and nigh t I B u t thou
read 'st black where I read white. "
34
Christianity persecuted the old gods and geniuses of ear th ,

water, fire , and air. I t conver ted those i t could not destroy :
some were cast into the abyss where they were given a place in
the bureaucracy of hel l ; o thers went to heaven and took their
place in the hierarchy of angels. Critical reason depop u la ted
heaven and hell , b u t the spiri ts returned to earth , to air, to fire,
and to water-they returned to the bodies of men and women.
This return is called Romanticism . Sensibility and passion are
the names of the plural spirit which l ives in rocks, clou ds, rivers,
and bodies. The cult of sensibili ty and passion is polemi cal .
A double theme runs through i t : the exaltation of Nat ure is as
much a moral and political criticism of civiliza tion as the affir
mation of a time before history . Passion and sensibility repre
sen t naturalness : the genuine versus the artificial , the truly
original versus the fal sely new . Passion and sensibility belong to
the world of origins-to the time before and after history ,
...
always iden tical with i tself. \The debasement of this original,

sensi tive , passiona te time into history , progress, and civiliza tion
began , says Rousseau , when man first m arked off a pie ce of
land , saying t o himself, "This is m i n e , " and found people silly
enough to believe him . History s tarts with private prop erty.
Fracture of primordial tim e : beginning of history , beginning
of the history of inequality.
The modern nos talgia for an original time and for m ankind
reconciled with Natu re is an attitude radically differen t from
pre-Christian conceptions. A l though , like the pagan worl d ,
it postulates the existen ce of a golden age before history , this
age does not fit into a cyclical vision of tim e . The return to the
happy age will be the resul t not of the revolution of the stars,
but of the revolution wrough t b y men. The past does n o t
35
The Revolt o f the Future
return : men volun tarily and delibera tely invent it and put it
inside history . The past of revolu tions is one form which the
I
future assumes. t The pagans believed in an impersonal F a te ;

the moderns believe in freedom , which is the direct heir of
Christianity . Jfhe myste ry which perplexed Saint Augustine '\
,......_
'
how to reconcile human freedom and divine omnipote ncehas worried men since the eighteenth century . How far d oes
history determine us and to what point can man channel
and change its c ourse? To the paradox of necessity and freedom
another may be adde d : the criticism of mod ern society adopts
the form of an act of violence. R evolution is criticism translated
into action . At the same time revolu tion is the renewal of the
original pact among equals, the restoration of a time p rior to
history and inequality . Thi s restoration implies a negation
of history , although such a negation will take place by virtue of
an eminently historical act: cri ticism conver ted into revolu
tionary action . The return to primordial time, before history
and inequality , represents the triumph of criticism .;. Thus we can
say , how ever surprising the proposition m ay appear, that only
the mod ern era can bring abou t the return tq primordial time
,
because only the modern era can deny itself.
M odern poe try , since its birth a t the end of the eighteenth
,.
cen tury , has embodied such a cri ticism of criticism . For this
reason it seeks its founda tion on a principle both anted ating and
antagonistic to, modernity . This principle , impervious to change
and temporal succession, is R ou sseau 's beginning of the begin
ning, but it is also William B l ake 's Adam , Jean Paul's vision,
Novalis' analogy , Wordsworth's childhood , Coleridge's imagina
tion . Modern poetry affirms i tself as the voice of this p rinciple ,
36
and sees itsel f as the original word of foundation. Poetry is the

original langu age of society, before all religious revel ations ; at
the same time , i t is the language o f history and change : revolu
tion . The principle of poetry is social and therefore revolu
tionary : i t is the return to the original pact, before inequality. It
is i ndividual and belongs to every man and to every woman ; it
is the reconquest of original innocence . It opposes both the
modern age and Christiani ty, but it is also a confirmation both
of the histori cal time of the modern world (revolution ) and
of the m ythic time of Christianity (original innocence ) . The
theme of the estab1ishmen t of another society is a revolutionary
theme, which places in the fu ture the time of the beginning ;
the restoration of original innocence i s a religious theme which
places the past before the Fall in the present . The history of
modern poetry is that of the oscillation between revolutionary
temp tation and religi ous temptation.
37
At least h a l f of the history o f m odern poe try is the story o f the

fascination poets have fel t toward systems fashioned b y critical
reason . "Fascinate " in this conte x t means bewitch , mesmerize
and deceive. As in the case of the German Romantics , rep ul
sion inevitably followed attraction. This group is usually
considered Catholic and monarchic, and hostile to the French
Revolution . Nevertheless, initially most of them fel t en thusiasm
and sympathy for the revolu tionary movement . I ndeed , their
conversion to Catholicism and to monarchic absolu tism was as
mu ch the consequence of the ambiguity of Romanticism
always torn between two ex tremes-as of the nature of the
historical dilemma faced by thi s generation . The French Revo
lu tion h ad two aspects : as a revolu tionary movemen t i t o ffered
European nations a universal vision of man and a new concep
tion of society and of the S tate ; as a national movemen t it
strengthened French expansionism outside the coun try , and ,
within, the policy of centralization begun by Richelieu . The
wars against the Consulate and the Empire were simultaneously
wars of national liberation and w ars in defense of monarchic
absolutism. For example, the Spanish liberals who collaborated
38
Children o f the M ire
wi th the French were loyal to their political ideas but disloyal

to their country , whereas other S paniards had to resign them
selves to combining the cause of Spanish independence with
that of the wre tched Ferd inand V I I and the Church .
Apart from poli tical circumstances, the attitude of the Ger
man Roman tics was far from conservative . H olderlin comes to
mind ( though , like Blak e , he is not strictly Romantic, and for
the same reasons : chronologically both sligh tly antedate
Romanticism and ex tend past i t , to reach us today ) . In the days
of the F irst Coalition against the French Repu blic (June 1 7 9 :2 ) ,
h e wrote to h i s sister : "Pray tha t the revolu tionaries d e feat
the Austrians, for o therwise the princes will abuse their power
dreadfully. Believe me and pray for the French who are the
defenders of the rights of man . " A li ttle l a ter, in 1 7 9 7 , he
wrote an ode to Bonaparte -to the l iberator of I taly , not to the
general who was to t urn , he charged scornfully in another
letter, i n to "a sort of dicta tor. " The theme of H olderlin's
novel Hyperion is dual : l ove for D io tima is inseparable from
the establishment of a communi ty of free men . The poin t of
union b e tween love of Dio tima and love of freedom is poetry.
Hyperion's struggle for his country's freedom is also his strug
gle to found a free society , and the establishment of th is
idyllic community imp lies a return to Ancient Greece . Poetry
and history , l anguage and community, poetry as frontier
between divine and human speech -these opposition s became
the central themes of modern poe try .
The dream of a free and egali tarian community , inherited
from Rousseau , reappears among the early German Roman ti cs,
39
again linked with love, bu t more violently and sharply . They

saw love as transgression of social bonds, and exalted w oman
not as e rotic object but as erotic subject too. Navalis spoke
of poetic communism , envisi oning a socie ty in which b oth the
consumption and production of poe try would be a collective
act. In L ucinda ( I 7 9 9 ) , Frederick Schlege l made an ap ology for
free l ove. His novel may seem n aive today , but Navalis w anted
to give i t the subtitle, Cynical or Diabolic Fan tasies. This
phrase an ticipated one of the m ost powerful and persi stent
curren ts of modern literature : the taste for sacrilege an d
blasphemy , the strange and the grotesque , the marriage of the
commonplace and the supernatura l , in short , the love of irony,
that great invent ion of the Rom a n tics. It is precisely irony,
in Schlege l 's sense of the word- love for the contradic tion
which lives in each of us, and awareness of this contradiction
that nourishes and destroys e an oman ticis!TI . This was
-
the first and most daring of the poetic revolutions, the fi rst to
explore the underground regions of the dream, unconscious

thought , and eroticism . It was also the first to turn nostalgia for
the past in to an aesthetic and a political program ..
The English Romantics provide a similar example . While
students at Cambridge , Southey and Coleridge conceived the
idea of Pan tisocracy as a free, egalitarian, communistic socie ty
which was to combine the "innocence of the patriarchal epoch"
wi th the "refinements of modern Europe . " The revolu tionary
theme of libertarian communism and the religi ous theme
of the restoration of original inn ocence were thus inte rwoven.
Coleridge and Sou they decided to leave for America to found
their pan tisocra tic society on the new con tinent , bu t the former
40
changed his mind when he found ou t that Sou they wanted to

take a servan t with him ! Many years later Southey was visited in
his Lake District retreat by the young Shelley and his first
wife, Harriet. The old ex-Republican poet found his you ng
admirer, "exactly as I was in 1 794" ; yet, wri ting of this visi t to
his friend E lizabeth Hi tchener (1 anuary 7, 1 8 1 2 ), Shel ley says
"Sou they is a man corrupted by the world , contamin a ted by
custom . "
Wordsworth first visited France in 1 790. A year late r, when he
was twenty-one years old and j u st down from Cambridge , his
enthusiasm for the Republic took him back to France , where he
spent two years, first in Paris and then in Orleans . He was a
Girondin sympathizer. This fac t , together w i th his revu lsion at
the revolutionary terror, explains his dislike of the J acobins ,
whom he called the " tribe o f M oloch . " As m any twen tie th
century wri ters would do with the struggles of the R u ssian
Revolution, Wordsworth took the side of one of the fact ions
trying to take control of the Fre n ch Revolution : the losing side.
In his au tobiographical poem The Prelude -with that hyperbolic
style fil led with capital letters which makes this great poe t
also one o f the most pompous o f h i s cen tury -he describes one of
the happiest moments of his life . It was a day in a tow n on the
coast where "all that I saw or fel t/Was gen tleness and peace , "
and h e heard a traveler recen tly land ed from France say :
"Robespierre i s dead . " H e feels no less antipathy for B onaparte ,
and in the same poem tells how , when he learned that the Pope
had crowned Napoleon Emperor, he fe lt it was "This last
opprobrium , when we see a people I . . . take a lesson from the
dog I Returning to his vomit . "
41
Child ren of the M ire
Faced with the disasters of history and the "degradation of

the era , " Wordsworth re turns to childhood and i ts moments of
translucency . Time splits in half, so tha t , rather than looking
at reality , we look through i t . What Wordsworth sees, as perhaps
no one before or a fter him has seen, is not a fantastic world ,
but reality as it is : the tree , the stone , the stream , each firm ,
resting on its own reality in a sort of immobili ty wh ich d oes not
negate movement . These blocks of living time, spaces flowing
slowly b efore the mind 's eye , are a vision of the o ther time ,
a time d i ffere nt from the time of history with its kings and
nations under arms, its revolu tionary couqcils and i ts b lood
thirsty priests, i ts guillo tines and gallows -:' The time of child
hood is the time of imagination , that faculty called by
"
Wordsworth the "s ol.I i ofi1 ature , " to signify that it is a p ower
beyond the human' I magi nation d oes not reside in m a n ; rather

it is the spirit of the place and of the moment. I t is not only
the power that allows us to see both the visible and the h idden
aspects of reality, but also the m eans whereby Nature looks
at herself through the poe t 's eyes. Through imagina tio n Nature
speaks t o us and to hersel f.
The vicissi tudes of Wordsworth 's political passion can be
explained in terms of his private l i fe . His years of e n th usiasm
for the Revolu tion can be said to be those of his love for
Annette (Anne Marie Vallon), a French girl whom he a band oned
as soon as he started to change his political opinion s . The years
of his growing hostility for revolu tionary movements c oincide
with his decision to leave the world and live in the country
wi th his wife and sister Dorothy . But this simplistic explanation
diminishes us, not Wordsworth . There is another explanation,
42
an intellectual and historical one that has to do with Words

worth 's political affinity for the Girond ins, his repugnance
toward the esprit de systeme of the J acobins, the mora l and
philosophical convictions which led him to carry his Protestan t
disapproval of p apist universalism to revolu tionary u n iversalism ,
and his Englishman's reaction to Napoleon's at temp ted i nvasion.
This explanation combines the liberal's antipathy for revolu
tionary d espotism with the patriot's antagonism toward the
hegemonic pretensions of a foreign power, and , with reserva
tions, can be applied also to the German Romantics. To consider
the conflict between the early Romantics and the Fren ch
Revolution as an episode in the clash between authoritarianism
and freedom is not totally false , n or is i t completely true .
No, there is another explanatio n . The phenomenon is seen
time and again in differen t historical circumstances, throughout
the nine teenth cen tury and afterward , with more in tensity,
down to the present . It is hardly necessary to cite the experi
ences of M ayakovsky , Pasternak , Mandelstam , and so m any
other Russian poets, artists, and wri ters ; the polemics of the
Surrealists with the Third In terna tional ; the bitterness of Cesar
Vallej o, torn between loyalty to poetry and loyal ty to the
Communist Party ; th e quarrels about "socialist realism " and
bu t why go on? M odern poetry has been and i s a revol utionary
passion, b u t this p assion has been an unhappy one . Th ere has
been attraction and rejection ; and it is not the philosophers but
the revolu tionaries who have banished the p oets from their
republic . The reason for rejection is the sam e a s for a t tra c tion :
both revolu tion and poetry attempt to destroy the present,
the time of h istory which is that of inequ ali ty , and to restore
43
Children of t h e M ire
the o th er time. But poetry 's time is not that of revolu tion, the
dated time of critical reason , the future of the U topias ; i t is
the time before time, the time of Ia vie an terieure which
reappears in the child 's timeless glance.
Poetry 's ambiguity toward cri tical reason and its hist orical
incarnation s, the revolu tionary m ovements, is one side of the
coin ; the other side is i t s ambiguity toward Christiani t y .
Again, a ttraction and rejection . Almost a l l the great Romantics,
heirs of Rousseau and eighteenth-cen tu ry deism , were religion
oriented , b u t what were the actual beliefs of H olderlin , B lake,
Coleridge, Hugo , Nerval? One m ight ask the same question
of those who openly declared themselves irreligious. Shelley 's
atheism is a religious passion . In 1 8 1 0, in a letter to Thomas
Hogg he writes: "0 ! I burn with impatience for the moment of
Christianity's dissolution ; i t h as inj ured me
I will s tab the
wretch in secre t . " This is odd language for an a theist a nd fore

shadows the Nietzsche of later years. R ej e ct ion of religion
and love for religion : each poet invents his own mythology, and
each mythology is a mixture of differen t beliefs, rediscovered
myths, and personal obsessions. Holderlin's Christ is a sun god ,
and in that enigmatic poem called "The Only One," Jesus
turns into the b rother of Hercules and of that Dionysu s who
"yoked his chariot to a team of tigers and went d ow n to the
I nd u s . " The Virgin of the poems of Navalis is the mother of
Christ and the p re-Chri stian Nigh t , his fiancee Sophie, and
Death . Nerval 's Aurelia is I sis, Pandora , and the actress Jenny
Colon, h is unhappy love. The religions and loves of the R oman
tics are heresies, syncretisms, apostasies, blasphemies, conver-
44
sions. Roman tic ambiguity has two modes, in the musical

meaning of the word : irony, whi ch in trod uces the negation of
subjectivity into the realm of obj ectivity ; and anguish, which
drops a hint of nothingness into the fullness of being. I rony
reveals the duality of what seemed whol e , the spli t in what is
identica l , the other side of reason ; i t is the d i sruption o f the
principle of identity. Anguish shows that existence is e m p ty ,
that life i s death, that heaven is a desert ; i t i s the fracturi ng
of religion .
The death of God is a R omantic theme . I t is n ot phil osophical
but religious : as far as reason is concerned , God either exists
or does not exist . I f He exists, He cannot die ; if not , how can
someone who has never existed die? But this reasoning is
only valid from the point of view of monotheism an d the
rectilinear and irreversible time of the West . The ancie nts knew
tha t the gods were mortal ; they were manifestations of cyclical
time and as such would come to life again and die again. Up
and down the Mediterranean coastline sailors heard a voice
at n ight saying "Pan is dead , " and this voice announcing the
god 's death also announced his resurrection. The Nahu atl legend
tells us tha t Quetzalcoa tl aband ons Tula ; immolates himself;
becomes the double plan e t , Morning and Evening S tar ; and will
one day return to claim his heritage. But Christ came t o earth
only once, for each event in the sacred history of Chri stianity is
unique and will not be repeated . If someone say s "God is dead ,"
he is announcing an u nrepeatable fact : God is dead forever.
Within the concept of time as a linear and irreversible progres
sion, the death of God is unthinkable, for the death of G od
opens the gates of contingency and unreason . There is a d ouble
45
reply to thi s : irony , humor, intellectual paradox ; and also the

poetic p aradox , the image. Both appear in all the Romantics.
The pre d ilection for the grotesque, the horrible, the strange , the
sublim e , and the bizarre ; the aesthetic of contrasts; the pact
b etween laughter and tears, p rose and poetry , agnostic ism and
fai th ; the sud den changes of mood , the an tics--:-every thi ng that
turns each Romantic poet into an Icaru s , a Satan, and a clown is
essentially anguish and irony . A lthough the source of e a ch of
these at titudes is religious, i t is a strange and contradi c t ory sort
of rel igion since i t consists of the awareness that rel igion i s
hollow . Romantic religiosity is i rreligious, iron i c ; Romantic
irreligion is religious, anguished .
The theme of the d ea th of God , in this religious/irreligious
sense , appears for the first time, I think, i n Jean Paul Richter. I n
this great precursor are merged all the trends and curre nts whi ch
will u n fold in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry- and
novel-writing-oneiri sm , humor, anguish, the mingling of
genres, fantastic l iterature allied w i th realism and realism joined
to philosophical speculation . Jean Paul ' s Dream is a dream of
the death of God ; i ts complete t i tle is Speech of Christ, from
the Universe, That There Is No God ( 1 796). In an earlier version
of the work, signifi cantly, it is not Christ bu t Shakespeare
who announces the news. For the Roman tics, Shakesp eare was
the poet by antonomasia, as Virgil had been for the M i ddle
Ages. Thus, when Jean Pau l lets the announcement come from
the mouth of the English poe t , he forecasts what all the
Romantics will say later : poets are clairvoyants and prophets
through whom the spiri t speaks. The poet replaces the priest,
and poetry becomes a revelation rivaling the Scriptures. The
46
defini tive version of Jean Paul's Dream underscores the d eeply

rel igious charac ter of this essen tial tex t , and , at the sam e time,
its completely blasphemous nature . I t is not a philosopher
or a poe t , bu t Christ himself, the son of G od , who affirms that
God d oes not exist. And the place where this is mad e known
is a church in a cemetery . The time may be midnigh t , but how
can one know for sure , since the face of the clock has nei ther
numbers nor hands , and on its empty surface a black h and
tirelessly traces signs which d isappear at once and which the
dead try in vain to decipher. Descending into the midst of the
clamoring shades, Christ says : "I have explored the worlds,
flown up to the suns, and I have fou nd no G od . I have been to
the ex treme limits of the universe , I have l ooked into the abyss
and shouted 'Fa ther, where are you? ' but I heard only the
rain fall ing into the dep ths and the everlasting tempest which no
order governs . " Dead children c rowd around Christ and ask,
" 1 esu s , h ave we no Father? " He replies, "We are all orphans. "
Two themes are intertwined i n the Dream : the death of the

Christian God , the universal Father and Creator of the world ;
and the absence of a d ivine or na tural ord er regulating the
movement of the universe . The second theme d irectly contra
dicts the ideas spread by the new philosophy among the culti
vated spirits of the time . Enlightenment philosophe rs had
attacked Christianity and its God made man, but the d eists as
well as the materialists postu lated the existence of a u n iversal
order. With few excep tions the eighteenth century bel ieved
in a cosmos ruled by laws which d id not d iffer essentially from
those of reason . An intelligent necessi ty , d ivine or natural,
moved the worl d . The universe was a rational mechanism.
47
Jean Paul's vision manifests the exact opposite : disord er,

incoherence . The universe is no t a mechan ism b u t a vast form
lessness agitated in a way which without exaggeration can be
called passionate. Tha t rain which is fal ling from the very
beginning into the endless abyss, and that everlasting storm on
a l andscape in convulsion are the very image of contingency .
In this lawless universe, this world cast adrift , this grotesque
vision of the cosmos, "eternity lies heavy upon chaos and when
it consumes i t , eternity is i tself consumed . " We have b e fore
us the "fallen N ature" of the Christians, but the relation
between God and the world is i nverted . it is not the world
fallen from God's hand that casts itself in to nothingness, but
God himself who falls into the pit of dea th . This is an enormous
blasphem y , at once irony and anguish . Philosophy h ad conceived
a world moved not by a creator bu t by an intelligent order; for
Jean Paul contingency is a consequence of the death o f God .
The universe is chaos because i t has no creator. J ean Paul's
atheism is religious and clashes with the a theism of the philoso
phers, for he replaces the image of the world as a mechanism
with that of a convulsive world , endlessly in death throes yet
never dying. In the existential sphere universal contingency is
called o rphanhood . And the first orphan , the Great Orphan, is
none other than Christ. Dream scandalizes the philosopher as
well as the priest, the atheist as well as the believer.
J ean Paul's dream was dreamed , though t , and suffered by
many poets, philosophers, and novelists of the nineteenth and
twentieth cen turies : Nietzsche, Dostoevski, M allarm e , J oyce,
Valery . It was known i n France thanks to M adame de S tael ' s
book On Germany ( 1 8 1 4) . There i s a poem by Nerval , com-
48
posed of five sonnets and en titled "Christ on the Moun t o f

Olives" ( 1 844 ), which is an adaptation o f the Dream . J ean
Paul 's tex t is convu lsive , abrupt, and exaggerated . The French
poet does away with the confessiona l , psychological element.
His is the accoun t , not of a dream , but of a myth ; not the
nightmare of a poe t in a ceme tery church , but Christ's m ono
logue before his sleeping disciple s . A magnificent line , "le dieu
manque a l 'autel ou j e suis Ia victime " (There is no God at the
altar on which I am the victim) , in the first sonnet broaches
a theme not found in Jean Paul and whi ch the following son
nets bring to a climax in the very last line of all. I t is the theme
of the e ternal re turn, which will reappear with unparalleled
intensity and lucidity in N} etzsch e , again associated w i th the

theme of the death of God . In N e rval's poem , Christ 's sacrifice
in this godless world converts him into a new god -except
that he becomes a divinity who has little in comm on w ith the
Christian G od . Nerval 's Christ is an I carus, a Phaethon , a
beautifu l , wounded A ttis whom Cybele b rings back to life.
The earth becomes intoxicated with this p recious blood ,
Olympu s collapses into the abyss, and Caesar asks the oracle
of J upiter Ammon , "Who is this new god ? " The oracle is
silent, for the only one who can explain this mystery to the
world is "Celui q ui donna l 'ame aux enfants du lim on " (He
who breathed a soul into the child ren of the mire ) . This mystery
is insolu ble , for He who breathes a soul into the Adam of mud
is the Father, the Creator, that very God who is abse n t from
the altar where Christ is the victim . A cen tury and a half later
Ferna nd o Pessoa faces the same enigma and his answer is
somewhat similar to Nerval's. There is n o God but there are
49
gods, and time is circular : " 'Dios es un hombre de otro Dios mas
grand e ; I Tambien tuvo caida , Adan supremo ; I Tam bien ,
aunque criador, el fue criatura ' ' (God is a man to another,
greater God , and thi s greatest Adam also fel l ; Though the
creator, he was a creature ) .
The p oetic consciousness of the West has accepted the death
of God as though i t were a myth ; or rather, thi s d eath truly
has been a myth , not merely an episode in the history of our
society 's religious ideas. The theme of universal orpha nhood , as
symb olized in Christ, the great orphan and elder brother of
the orphan children who are all mankind, expresses a p sy chic
experience recal ling the path of negation of the mystics. It is
that "dark night" in which we feel ourselves adrift, abandoned
in a hostile or indifferent worl d , guilty without guilt, and
innocen t without i nn ocence . H owever, there is an esse n tial
difference : it i s a night withou t an end , Chri stianity w i thou t
God . A t the same time, the death of God awakens i n the poetic
imagination a sense of my thic s tory telling, and a strange cos
mogony is created in which each god is the cre a tu re , the Adam ,
of another god . I t i s the re turn to cyclical time, the transmuta
tion o f a Chri stian theme i n to a paga n myth . A n inc omplete
paganism , a Christian paganism permeated w i th anguish for the
fall i n to contingency .
These two experiences-Ch ri stianity without God , and
Christian paganism -have been basic elements of Weste rn poetry
and literature since the Roman tic era. In both we face
double
transgression. The death of God converts the a theism of the

philosophers into a religious experience and a myth ; in turn this
experi ence denies its very origi n : the myth is empty , a play of
50
Child ren of the Mire
reflections on the lonely consciousness of the poe t , for there is

no one on the a l tar, not even Christ the victim. Anguish and
irony : faced with the fu ture time of critical reason and revolu
tion , poetry affirms the nonseq uential time of sensibi l i ty and
imagina tion, original time . In the face of Christian e ternity,
it affirms the death of God, the fall into con tingency, and the
plurality of gods and myths. But each of these negations
turns against itself: the time of the imagination is not a mythic
but a revolution ary time ; the death of God is not a ph ilosophic
bu t a religious theme , a myth . Romantic poetry is revolu tion
ary , not with b u t against the revolutions of the century ; and its
religion is a transgression of religi on.
In the Middle Ages poetry was the hand maiden of religi on ;
in the Romantic era i t was the true religion , the founta inhead
of the Holy S criptures. Rousseau and Herder h ad shown that
language answered man's emotional rather than spiri tual needs ;
not hunger bu t love, fear, or wonder made u s speak
;}i umanity's
first cred os were poems. Whe ther we are dealing with magic
spells, li tan ies, m y ths, or p rayers, the p oe tic imagination i s there

from the star t . \Vithout poetic imagination there would be no
myths or Holy Scriptures ; at the same time , and also from the
beginning, rel igi on confiscates the products of poetic imagina
tion for her own ends. The charm of myths does not lie in
their religious n a ture-these beliefs are not ours-bu t from the
fact tha t i n them p oetic story telling transfigures the world
and reality . One of the cardinal functions of poetry is to show
the other side , the wonders of everyda y l i fe : not poetic irreality
but the prodigious reality of the world . iReligion takes over
,I
.,_
51
Childre n of the M ire
these visions, transf<;>rms works of imagination into beliefs, and

beliefs i n to systems. Bu t even then the poet gives percep tible
form to religious ideas, transmu tes them into images, and ani
mates them : cosmogonies and geneal ogies are poems, H oly
Scriptures are wri t ten by poe ts. I ndeed , the poet is the geog
rapher and the historian of heaven and hell : Dante describes the
geography and the inhabitants of the o ther world ; Mil t on tells
us the true story of the Fall.
The critique of religion undertaken by eighteenth-century
philosophy sha t tered Christianity as the basis of society. The
fragmentation of eternity into historical time m ade i t possible
for poetry to conceive of itself as the real founda tion of society.
Poetry w as believed to be the true rel igion and knowledge.
Bibles, GospeJs, and Korans had been denounced by the philoso
phers as bundles of old wives' t ales and fantasies. At the same
time, even materialists recognized tha t these tales possessed
a poetic tru th . In their search for a found a tion predati ng
revealed or natural rel igion, poets found allies among the
philosophers. Kan1's influence was d ecisive i n the second phase
of Coleridge's though t . The German philosopher had shown
tha t between the sense data and the understanding, tha p articu
lar and the universal 'the " p rod u ctive imagination" acted as
intermediary . Through it the subject transcend s himse l f:
imagina tion projects and presents the objects of the sense data
to the unders tanding. I magination is the condition of k n owl
edge : w i thou t it there could be no link between percep tion
and j udgmen t. For Coleridge the imagination is not only the
necessary condi tion for all knowledge, it is also the faculty
which converts ideas into symbols and symbols into p resences.
52
Imagina tion is "a form of Being" : no longer j ust knowledge

but wisd om . Coleridge believed there was no difference between
poetic imagination and religious revelation , ex cep t tha t the
latter is historic and changing, whereas poets (insofar as they are
poets, and whatever their beliefs may b e ) are not "the slaves
of any sectarian opinion . " He also said that religion was the
"poetry of m ankind . " Years before, Navalis had written tha t
" Religion is pra ctical poetry " and p oe try was the "first reli
gion of humanity . " There are many such quotations, all
with the same m eaning : Romantic p oe ts were the first to affirm
the historical and spiritual priority of p oe try over offi cial
religion and philosophy . F or them the poetic word is the
founding word . I n this bold affirmation lies the roo t of the
heterodoxy of modern poetry in the face of religions and
ideologies alike.
In the figure of William Blake are con centrated all the con
tradictions of the first generation of Romantics ; they exp lode
/
in an affirmation transcending Roman ticism . Was Blake really a
Roman tic? Nature worship, one of the traits of Romantic
poe try , does not appear in his work . He considered the world
of imagination e ternal, the world of generation finite and
tempora l . The first was mental , the o ther was a "vegetable
glass" d i storting our vision . These ideas seem to link him with
the Gnostics, but his l ove for the body and his ex altation of
erotic desire and p leasu re ("soone r murder an infant in its
cradle than nurse u nacted desires " ) set him i n opposition to the
Neoplatonic tradition. Was he a Christian? H is is not the
Christians' Christ, but a nude Ti tan bathed in the radia nt sea
of erotic energy , a demiurge for whom imagining and d oing,
53
desire and satisfaction are one and the sam e . His Chri s t reminds
us of Satan ; his huge body , like a gigantic cloud lit by ligh tning,
is covered with the flaming letters of the proverbs of H e l l .
I n the early years of the French Revolution, !!l'!ke used t o
walk about the streets of London with the blood-red Phrygian
cap on his head . His political e n thusi asm eventually wane d ,
but n o t the ard or o f h i s imagin a tion, at once libertari a n and
Iibera ting :
"All B ibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the fol
lowing Errors : I . Tha t Man has two real existing pri n ciple s :
Viz : a Body and a Soul . 2 . Tha t Energy , call'd Evi l , i s alone
from the B od y ; and tha t Reason, call'd Good , is alone
from the Soul. 3 . That G od w ill torment Man in E tern i ty for
following his Energies.
"Bu t the following Contraries to these are True : 1 .. M an has
n o B ody distinct from his S ou l ; for that call'd Body is a

portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chie f inlets
of Soul in this age . 2 . Energy is the only l i fe , and is from the
Body ; and Reason is the bound or ou tward circumference
of Energy . 3 . Energy is E ternal Deligh t . "
The violence o f B l ake's anti-Christian affirmations pre figured
that of Rimbaud and Nietzsche . He attacked the rationalistic
deism of the philosophers just as violently : Vol taire and
Rousseau were victims of his anger, and in his prophetic poems
Newton and Locke appear as agents of Urizen , the demiurge
of evi l . U rizen is the l ord of systematic reason , inventor of the
morality which imprisons men in its syllogisms, divide s them
54
one against the o ther, and each against himself. Uri zen : reason
without body and without wings, the great j ailer. Blake not
only denou nced the superstition of philosophy and the idolatry
of reason, b u t , in the century of the first industrial revolu tion
and in the country which was the cradle of this revolu tion, he
prophesied the dangers of the cult of progress. The landscape of
England was starting to change , and hills and valleys were
becoming covered with the vege tation of industry : iron, coal,
dust, and w aste . He is in all things our con temp orary .
I n Blake's contradicti ons and eccentricities there is a larger
coherence not fou nd in any of his criti cs . Eliot charged his
mythology with being undigested and syncretistic, a private
religion m ade up of fragments of my ths and eccentric beliefs.
One could accuse most m odern poets o f the same thing, from
Holderlin and Nerval to Yeats and Rilke ; faced with th e progres
sive d isintegra tion of Christian myth ology , poets-not ex cluding
the poet of Tlze Waste Land-have had to inven t more or less
personal mythologies m ade up of fragme n ts of philosophies and
religions. I n spite of this diversity of poe tic systems-rather, in
its very center-a common belief can be d iscerned . This belief
is the true religion of modern poe t ry , from Romanticism to
Surrealism , and i t appears in all poets, sometimes impl icitly bu t
more often explici tly. I am talking about analogy . The belief
in correspondences between all beings and worlds pred ates
Christianity, crosses the Middle Ages, and , through Neopla
tionism , illuminism , and occultism , reaches the nineteenth cen
tury. Since then, secretly or openly, it has never failed to nourish
Western poets, from Goethe to B alzac, from Baudelaire and
Mallarm e to Yeats and Pessoa.
55
Analogy outlived p aganism and will probably ou tlive Christi

ani ty and contemporary scientism . I t has h ad a dual fu nction i n
the history o f modern poetry : it w a s the principle before all
principles, before the reason of philosophies and the revelation
of religions; and this principle coincided with poe try i t se l f.
Poetry i s one of the manifestations of analogy ; rhyme s and
alliterations, metaphors and metonymies are modes of operation
in analogical though t . A poem is a spiral sequence which turns
ceaselessly without ever returning completely to its beginning.
If analogy turns the universe into a poe m , a text made up of
oppositions which become resolved in correspondences, it also
makes the poem a universe . Thu s , we can read the u niverse ,
we can live the poem . I n the first case p oetry is knowledge ; in
the second , it is action . In both it borders on philosophy and
religion, but only to con tradict them . The poetic image shapes a
reality which rivals the vision of the revolutionary and that of
the religious. Poetry is the other coherence, made not of reasons
bu t of rhythms. And there is a moment when the correspond
ence is broken ; there is a d issona nce which in the poem is called
"irony , " and in life "mortality . ' Modern poetry is awareness
of this d isso n a n c within analogy .
Poe tic mytho l ogies, including th ose of Christian poets, grow

old and become dust as do religions and philosophies. B u t
poetry remains, a n d thus we c a n con tinue t o read t h e Vedas
and Bibles, not as religious but as poeti c tex ts. Here again is
Blake : "The Poetic Genius is the True Man . . . all sects of
Philosophy are adapted from the Poetic Genius . . .. the Religions
of all Nations are derived from each Nation's d ifferent reception
of the Poetic Genius. " A lthough religions belong to history
56
and perish, in all of them a nonreligious seed survive s : poetic

imagination. Hume would have smiled at such a strange idea .
Whom can we believe? Hume and his critique of religion or
Blake and his exal tation of imagination? For all the fo unders
Wordsworth , Coleridge , Holderlin , Jean Pau l , Navalis-poetry
is the world of nonsequen tial time , the time of the body and
of desire . Beginning word : founding word . But also disintegrat
ing word , the breaking away from analogy through irony or
anguish , through the awareness of history whi ch in the m is the
knowledge of d eath .
57
Analogy and Irony
A literary movement, Romanticism was also a new morality,

a new eroticism , and a new politics. I t may not have b een
a religion , bu t it was more than an aesthetic and a philosophy :
a way of thinking, feeling, falling in l ove, fighting, traveling-a
way of l iving and a way of dying. Frederi ck Schlege l , i n one
of his programmatic wri tings, said that R oman ticism n o t only
proposed the dissolu tion and mix ture of literary genres and
ideas of beau ty , it also sough t the fusion of life and poetry by
means of the contradi ctory but convergent actions of imagina
tion and irony. Even more, its aim was to socialize poe try .
Romantic though t unfold s in two directions which end in
fu sion /the search for that anterior p rinciple which makes
poe try the basis of language and thu s 9 f society ; and the union
of this p rinciple with life and history l f p oetry was m an 's
first language-or i f language is essentially a poetic opera tion

which consists of seeing the world as a fabri c of symbols and
relationships between these sym bols-then each society is built
upon a p oem > I f the revolu tion of the modern age is the move'
ment of society back to its origins, to the primordial p act of

equal w i th equal, then this revolu tion becomes one wi th poetry
Blake said : "all men are alike in the Poetic Genius . " Romantic
poetry, too , claims to be action ; a poem is not only a v erbal
58
thing, but a profession of fai th and an act. Eve n the doctrine of

"art for art's sake," whi ch seems to deny this a ttitude, confirm s
and prolongs i t , for i t w a s an ethi c a s well a s an aesthe tic, and
quite often implied a religious or poli tical stance .
Romanticism was b orn almost simul taneously i n England and
in Germ an y , and spread throughout Europe like a spiritual
epidemic . The pre-eminence of German and English Romanti
cism comes not only from chronological precedence , b u t from a
combination of critical insigh t and poe ti c originality . I n both
languages poetic creation is interwoven with critical re flections
on the nature of poetry , made with an intensi t y , origin ality ,
and penetration u npara lleled in o ther European literatures. The
critical texts of the English and Germ an Romantics were true
revolutionary manifestos, and established a tradition which con
tinues today. The j oining of theory and practice, poetry and
poetics, was one more manifestation of the Romantic aspiration
to unite the extremes-art and life , timeless antiquity and
con temporary h istory, imagination and irony. By means of the
dialogue between prose and poe try they tried to revitalize
poetry b y immersing it in everyday speech -and to idealize
prose by dissolving the logic of d iscourse in the logic of the
image . As consequences of this in terpenetra tion , we see through
out the nineteenth and twen tie th centuries the emergence of the
prose poem and the periodic renovation of p oetic language by
increasingly strong injections of p opular speech . B u t in 1 800, as
agai n in 1 920, what was new was not so m u ch tha t poets were
speculating in prose abou t poe try , bu t that this speculation over
flowed the limits of the old poetics, proclaiming that the new
poetry was also a new way of feeling and living.
The u nion of poetry and prose is a constant among E nglish
59
Analogy and I rony
and German Romantics, although it is not visible in all poets

with the same intensi ty and in the same fashion. In some , such
as Coleridge and Navalis, verse and prose , desp ite their inter
communication , are clearly independ en t . We have Kubla Khan
and The A ncien t Mariner on one sid e , the cri tical texts of
Biograph ia L iteraria on the other; or the Hymns to tlz e .Nigh t as

opposed to the philosophical prose of the Fragments. I n other
poets inspiration and re flection blend equally in prose and
verse . Neither Holderlin nor Wordsworth i s a philosophical poe t ,
fortunately for them , but in both thought tend s to turn into
perceptible image. In a poet like Blake , the poetic image is
inseparable from speculative thinking, ann the frontier between
prose and poetry cannot be distinguished .
Whatever the differences-and they are profound -which
separate these poets, they all conceive of poetry as a vital
experience involving the totality of the human being . A poem
is not only a verbal reality ; it is also an act. The poe t speaks,
and as h e speaks, he makes . This making is above all a making
of himself: poetry is not only self-kn o_} _ge but self-creation.
The reader re p e at s th e poe t 's experience of sel f-creation, and
poetry becomes incarnate in his tory . B ehind this idea lives the
old belief in the power of word s : poetry thought aud l ived as
a magical operation destined to transmute reality . The analogy
between magic and poetry , a recurring theme throughout the
nineteen th and twentieth centuries, originates with the German
Romantics. The conception of p oe try as magic implies an
aesthetic of action. Art ceases to be exclusively represe ntation
and contemplation ; it becomes also an intervention in reality.
If art mir!:Qrs the world , then the mirror is magical ; i t changes
the worl d _
60
Bo__q ue and Neoclassical aesthetics insisted on
s trict
division between art and life . A l though their ideas of beauty

were very d iffere n t , both emphasized the ideal nature of a
work of art. When Romanticism a ffirmed the primacy of
inspiration , passion , and sensibility , it erased the boun dary
f
be tween art and life . lThe poem was a vita!_exp_erie11ce , and life
acquired the intensity of poetry . For Calderon life is il lusion
and deceit because it has the duration and consistency of
dreams ; for the Rom antics what red eem s life from the horror of
i ts monotony is that it is a drea m . The Romantics see the
-
dream a s "a second life , " a way to recover the true l ife , the life
of primordial time. Poe try is the reconquest of innocence.
How can we fail to see the religious roots of this atti tude and
its intimate rela tion with the Protestan t tradition? o m an ti cism
---- -
- -- - --
- - - --
- - -
originated in England and Germany not only because i t was a

break with the Greco-Rom an aesthetic, b u t because of its
spiritual link with Protestantism . The inward nature of religious
experience stressed by Pro testan ti sm , as opp osed to th e ri tual
ism of R om e , supplied the psych i c and moral pre con d i tions
for the Romantic upheaval. Romanticism was above all a turning
inward of the poetic vision . Pro testanti sm made the in dividual
consciousness of each believer the theater of the religious
my stery ; Rom anticism disrupted the impersonal aesthetic of
the Gre co-Rom an tradition , and allowed the poet's ego to
:J
become the primary reality
To say that the spiritual roots o f Romanticism lie in the

Protestant tradi ti on may seem overly b old , especially if we
remember the conversions of various German Romantics to
Catholicism . But the true meaning of these conversion s i s clear
if one considers that Romanticism was a reacti on agai n st
61
Analogy and I rony
eigh teen th-century rationalism . The Catholicism of the German

Romantics was antirationalism , and it was no less ambiguous
than their admiration for Calderon. Their read ing of the Spanish
dramatist was more a profession of fai th than a true reading;
August S chlegel saw in him the negation of Racine, but he did
not realize that Calderon's plays contain a rational ord er no less
rigorous than that of the French poe t , rather more so. Racine's
theme i s aesthetic and psychological : human p assions ;
Calderon's theme is theological : original sin and human free
dom . The Romantic interpre tation of Calderon confused
Baroque poe try and Catholic neoscholasticism w i th anticlassi
cism and antirationalism .
The li terary frontiers of Romanticism are the same a s the reli
gious fron tiers of Protestantism . These frontiers were primarily
linguistic . Romanticism was born and reached maturity in
countries whose languages did not originate in Rome. The Latin
tradition , cen tral in Western cul ture up to tha t tim e , was finally
broken. O ther tradi tions appeared : popular and tradi tional
poetry from Germany and England, Gothic art , Celtic and
Germanic mythologies. The rej e c tion of the image of G reece
provided by the Latin trad ition caused the d iscovery ( or inven
tion) of another Greece-the Greece of Herder and H olderlin,
that wil l become Nietzsche's and our own . Dante's guide in
Hell is V irgil , Faust's, M ephistopheles. "The Classics ! " says
Blake , referring to Homer and Virgil , " l t is the Classics, not
Goths or Monks, that desolate Europe with wars . " And he adds :
"Grecian i s M athematic Form b u t Gothic i s Living Form . " As
for Rome : "a warlike State never can produce Art. " From the
Romantics on , the Western world recognized i tself as a trad ition
62
Chil d ren o f the M ire
differing from that of Rome, and this trad i tion is not single
but multiple.
Linguisti Cinfluence unfold s o n deeper levels. Romantic poe try
was not only a change o f styles, b u t a change of beliefs , and
this is what dis t inguishes i t radically from the o ther movements
of the past . Neither Baroque nor Neoclassica l art rej ec ted the
Western system of beliefs . To find a parallel to the Romantic
revolution we must go back to the Renaissance, above all, to
Provenal poetry . This last comparison is particularly revealing,
because in Provenal as in Roman tic poetry there is an undeni
able rel a tion, still not comple tely u nders tood, between the
metrical revolu tion , the new sensibility, and the cen tra l position
occupied by women in both movements. In Romanticism , the
metrical revolution consisted of resurrecting the traditional
poetic rhy thms of Germany and England . There is a reciprocal
relation between the resurrection of rhythms and form s and the
reappearance of analogy . The Romantic vision of the u niverse
and of m an was inspired by analogy . And analogy fu sed with
prosody : it was a vision more fel t than thought , and m ore heard
than fel t . Analogy conceives of the world as rhy thm : everything
corresponds because everything fi ts together and rhym es. It is
not only a cosmic syntax , it is also p rosody . If the universe is a
script, a tex t , or a web of signs, the rotation of these signs i s
governed by rhy thm . Correspondence a n d analogy are b u t
names for universal rhythm_ :
A lthough analogical vision inspires Dante as well as the
Renaissance Neoplatonists, its reappearance in the Romantic
era coin cides with the rej ection of Neoclassical archetypes
and the discovery of national poetic tradi tions. In unvei ling
63
Analogy and I rony
their traditional poetic rhythms, the English and Germ an

Romantics resusci tated the analogical vision of the world and of
man. It is impossible to prove a cause-and-effect rel a tion
between accentual versification and analogical vision , it i s
impossible also n o t to see that there i s a historical re lation
between them . The appearance of the first , in the Romantic
period , is inseparable from the second. Analogical vision had
been preserved as an idea by the occultist , hermetic, and
libertine sects of the seventeenth and e ighteenth centuries ;
when Engl ish and German poets translated this idea of " the
world as rhythm , " they translated it literally , turned it in to
verbal rhythm, into poems. The philosophers h ad though t of
the world as rhythm ; the poets heard the_ rhythm. It w as not
the language of the spheres-al though they thought i t was-but
the language of men.
The evolution of verse forms in the R omance languages is also
an ind irect proof of the corresp ondence between acce n tu al
versifi ca tion and analogical vision. The relation betwee n the
versification systems of the Rom ance and Germ anic languages
is one of inverse symme try . In the fanner, the stress of the
accents is secondary to the syllabic meter, while in the latter
the syllabic count is secondary to the rhythmic d istribu tion
of accen ts. Accentual versifi cation is more akin to song than to
discourse ; the d anger of English and German verse lies not in
intellectual dryness but in lyric confusion . The distinctive
feature of Romance prosody is j ust the opposi te . The tendency
to regularity, dominant since the Renaissance and fortified by
the influence of French Neoclassicism , was a constant fea ture in
versification systems down to the Romantic period . Syllabic
64
versification easily turns into abstract measurement and, as the

example of eigh teen th-century French poe try shows, into
discourse and reasoning in verse . I_> rose consumes poetry - not
the lively , colloquial prose which is one of the sources of
poetry , bu t the prose of oratory and intellectual discourse.
Eloquence ra ther t]l a !1 song. By the beginning of the n ineteenth
century , the Latin languages had l ost their powers of enchant
men t and cou ld no longer be veh icles for thought as antidis
cursive and essentially rhythmic a s analogy .
I f the resurrection of analogy coincided in Gennany and in
England with the retu rn to trad i tional poetic fonns , in Latin
countries it coincided w i th the revol t against regular syl labic
versification. In French th is revolt was m ore violent and
total than in I talian or Spanish because syllabic versifica tion
dominated French poetry more than it did other Romance
languages. It is significant that the two great precursors of the
Roman tic movement in France were prose wri ters , Rousseau
and Chateaubriand ; analogical vision unfolds m ore readily
in French prose than in the abstract meters of poetry. I t i s no
less significant that among the central works of real French
Romanticism we find A urelia , Nerval 's novel , and a handful of
narrations by Charles Nodier. Finally, among the great creations
of French poetry of the last century we fi nd the prose poem,
a form which realizes the Romantic desire to mix prose and
poetry . Such a form could have developed only in a language in
which the absence of tonic accents limits the rhy thmic resources
of free verse .
As for verse : Hugo unmade and remade the Alexandrine ;
Baudelaire introduce d reflection, dou b t , i rony-the mental
65
Analogy and I rony
caesura which rather than breaking the regular meter tends to

produ ce psychic irregularity, excepti()n ; imbaud experimented
with p opular poetry , song , free verse .' The prosodi c ren ovation
'
ended in two contradictory ex treme s : the broken lively rhy thms
of Lafargue and Corbiere and the musical score/conste llation
of Un coup de des . Lafargue and Corbiere had a profound
influence on the poets of both Americas, Lugones, Pound , Eliot,
and Lopez Velard e . With Mallarm e was born a form which
belongs nei ther to the nineteenth century nor to the fi rst half
of the twentieth cen tury , bu t t o the presen t . This haphazard
enumeration has only one purp ose : to show that the general
movement of French poetry du ring the last cen tury can be seen
as a revolt against traditional syllabic versification . The revolt
coin cided with the search for the principle that rules the universe
and the poem : analogy .
I have already referred to "real French R omanticism . "
Actually there are two : one i s the official Romanticism of the
textbooks and histories of li terature-eloquent, sentime n tal,
and discursive-exemplified by M usset and Lamartine ; the other,
which for me is the real one, is made up of a very sma l l number
of works and au thors : Nerval, Nodier, Hugo in his last period,
and the so-called "minor Romantics . " In fact, the true French
heirs of German and Engli sh Romanticism are the poe ts who
come a fter the official R omantics, from Gau tier and B audelaire
to the Symbolists. These poets give us a d i fferent versi on of
Roman ticism . Differen t , and yet the same, because th e h istory
of modern poetry is a surprising confirmation of the principle
of analogy : each work is the negation , the resurrection , and the
66
transfigura tion of the others . In this way French poetry of the

second half of the last century-to call it Symbol ist would be to
mutilate it-is inseparable from German and English R omanti
cism : it is its prolongation, but also its metaphor. I t is a transla
tion in which Roman ticism turns back upon itself, con templates
and sup ersedes i tself, questions and transcends i tself. This is
the oth er E uropean Romanticism .
I n each of the great French poets of this period the fan of
analogical correspondences opens and closes ; in the same way,
the history of French poetry , from L es Chim eres to Un coup de
des , can be seen as a vast analogy . Each poet is a stanza in

tha t poem of poems which is French poetry , and each poem is
a version , a metaphor of this plural tex t. If a poem is a system of
equivalences, as Roman J akobson has said -rhymes and allitera
tions which are echoes, rhy thms which play with reflections,
identity of metaphors and comparisons-then French p oe try as
a whole becomes a system of systems of equivalences, an analogy
of analogies. In its turn , this analogical system is an analogy of
the original R omanticism of both Germans and Englishmen . To
understand the unity of E uropean poetry without violating
its plurality we must conceive of it as an analogical system. Each
work is a unique reality and a t the same time a transla tion of
the others-its metaphor.
The influence of the occul tists, Gnostics, Cabalists, alchemists,
and other marginal figu res was also d eeply fel t by the French
poets. A t times they drank from the same fountain as the
German Romantics (Jakob B ohme, for instance, was k nown in
France through Louis Claude d e Saint-Martin . ) The occul tist
tradition , on the other hand , had become associated with
67
Analogy and I rony
certain trends of libertine and revolu tionary thinking. The

transition from the erotic mysticism of a Restif de Ia B re tonne
to the concep tion of a society moved by the sun of passional
attraction was accomplished by one man : Charles Fourier.
The figure of Fourier is as central to the history of Fre nch
------- - -
poe try as it is to the history of the revolu tionary movement. He

is no less con temporary than Marx -and I suspect will become
more so . Like Marx , Fourier believes that society is ru led by
force , coercion, and lies ; unlike Marx , he believes th at what
unites men is passional attraction : desire . To change society
means to free it of those obstacles which inhibit the operation
of the laws of passional attraction : "The first science I dis
covered was the theory of passion a te a t traction . . . I soon
recognized that the laws of passionate attraction conformed
completely to those governing the at traction of matter as
explained by Newton and Leibnitz, and that there was a unity
in the system of movem en t for bo th the ma terial and the

spiritual worlds . I suspected tha t this analogy could be ex tend ed
from general to particul ar laws, that the a t tractions and proper
ties of animals, vegetables, and minerals were perhaps coord i
nated on the same plan as those of mankind and the stars . . . .
And so I discovered the analogy of four movements : m a terial,
organic, animal , and social . . . . As soon as I realized th e theories
of at traction and unity of these four movements, I began to
read the handwriting of Nature . "
Offical criticism had ignored o r minimized Fourier's influence.
Now, thanks above all to Andre Bre ton , who was the first to
identi fy Fourier as one of the m agnetic centers of our time, we
know that there is a moment when revolu tionary though t
68
Children of t h e Mire
and poe tic though t converge : the idea of passional attraction.

Fourier: a secret au thor like Sade , th ough for differen t reasons.
When we speak of the "visionary " Balzac - the au thor of Louis
Lam bert. Seraplzita, La peau de chagrin . Me/m o th reconcilie

we think primarily of Sweden borg's influence, comple tely
forge tting Fourier. Even Flora Tristan, a great forerunner of
socialism and women's liberation , commited the same inj ustice :
"Fourier was a follower of Swedenborg ; by revealing the doc
trine of correspond ences, the Swed ish mysti c proclaimed the
universali ty of science and suggested to Fourier his beau ti fu l
system of analogies. Swedenborg con ceived heaven a n d hell
as systems moved by at traction and repulsion ; Fou rier wished
to realize on earth Swedenborg's heavenly d ream and he con
verted the angelic hosts into phalansterie s . " Stendhal said :
"perhaps within twenty years F ourier's genius will be recog
nized . " April 1 9 7 3 brough t the second centenary of his birth,
and we sti11 do not know his work wel l . A li ttle whi le ago
S imone Debout published a manuscrip t which had been hidden
by prudish di sciples, L e nouJJeau monde amoureux . In this
work Fourier sh ows himself as a sort of anti-Sad e and anti
Freud , although his ki)owlcdge of human passi ons was no less
profound than theirs: Against the current of his own age and
of our own , against a two-thousand-year-old trad i tion, Fourier
maintains that desire is not necessari ly deadly, as Sade affirmed :
and that society is not repressive by na ture , as Freud thought.
I t is scandalous in the West to con tend that pleasure is good ,
and Fourier is really a scandalous author, whereas Sad e and
Freud confirm in a C(\rtain way-negatively -the pessim istic
vision of Christianity .
69
Analogy and I rony
Baudelaire made analogy the center of his poetics. A center

in con tinuous oscillation, shaken by irony , awareness o f death,
the idea of sin-by Christianity, in short . Perhaps this a mbiva
lence (perhaps his politi cal skep ticism also) caused him to
attack Fourier so harshly. B u t this harshness is impassi oned, i t is
the other side of admiration : None d ay Fourier came t o show
us, with rather too much solemnity, the mysteries of a nalogy. I
.
do not deny the value of some of his minute d iscoverie s, though
I think his mind was too pre occupied to be able to reach an
exactness of de tail such th at he could understand truly and
totally the system he had ske tched . . . . M oreover, he c ould have
given us an equally precious revelation i f, instead of the con
templation of Nature , he had o ffered us readings of m any
excel l en t poets. N Basically Baudelaire is reproaching F ourier

for not having wri tten a system of poetics, that is, for not being
Baud elaire , for not having made a poetic ou t of analogy. For
Fourier the system of the universe (analogy) is the key to the
system of society ; for B aude laire the system of the universe is
the model for poetic creation . Mention of Swedenborg was
unavoid able : "Swedenborg, who had a greater soul , has shown
tis that heaven is a gigantic human being and that every thing
form , color, movement, numbe r, perfume -in the spiri tual as i n
the material realm-is meaningfu l , reciprocal and correspond
ent . " This admirable passage shows the creative nature of true
cri ticism : it begins with an invective and ends w i th a v ision
of universal analogy . However, we must remember tha t N avalis
had previously said , "He who touches the body of a w oman
--- :;.-.. --
---
- - - -"'Y---
. ....,
-'-,
...--
----- ---.....
1Quches the sky, " and that Fourier wrote , "human p assions are
anima ted rn a them a tics. "
p_ ;
---
70
w..-:- ... .
,
--- - - ------ -----
-----
--- - ----- -
Two ideas appear in B audelaire's conception. Al though the

first is very old , in him it is an obsession. I t consists in seeing
the universe as a language , a script . But it is a language in

unending movement and change : each sentence breeds another
sen tence , each says something which is always differen t and
yet says the same thing. In his es on _F_i!g!}r, Baudelai re
returns to this ide a : ' 'it is not surprising that true music suggests
analogous ideas in different mind s ; it would be su rprising if
sounds did not suggest colors, if colors could not call up the
idea of melodies, and if sounds and colors cou ld not transla te
ideas. Things have always expressed themselves by reciprocal
analogies, since the day God uttered the world as an indivisible
,
and complex total ity:h (Baudelaire gges n9_t !rile that "God
--- - - -
s.reat e_g)l! world, " but_tijat he "uttered" i t -_!le !aidjt . ) The

world is not an ensemble of thi ng s bu t o f signs ; or: r ather,
-
_,...
- - - - "- - - - -
. .. .
what we call things are in fact words . A m ountain is a word , a

river is another, a l andscape is a sentence . And all these sen
tences are in continual change : universal correspondence m eans
perpetual me tamorphosis. The tex t which is the world is not
one but m any : each p age is the translation and the me ta
morphosis of another page which is the same i n rela tion to
ano ther, and so on ad i n finitum. The world is the metaphor of
a metaphor. The world loses its reality and becomes a figure
of speech . At the heart of analogy lies emptiness : the multi
plicity of texts implies that there is no original tex t . I n to thi s
void the reality of the world and the meaning of langu age
together rush headlong and disappear. But it is Mallarm e and
not B au delaire who will d are to gaze i n to this v id and convert
this contempla
tion into the substance of poetry. 1
.
I
71
Analogy and Irony
Nor is the other idea which obsessed Ba e r any less

dizzyi ng : i f the universe is a cipher, a coded language , "what is
1
the poe t , in the widest sense , but a translator, a decipherer? "

Each poem is a reading of reali ty ; this reading is a translation ;
this translation is a writing, a new code for the reality which
is being unravelled . The poem i s the universe's double :
wri ting, a space covered with hieroglyphics. To wri te
poem
secre t
is to d ecipher the unive rse only to create a new cipher. The play
of analogy is infinite . The reader repeats the poet's a d ; to
read the poem is to translate i t and , inevitably , to convert i t
into another poem . The poetics of analogy consists ultimately
in conceiving li terary creation as a translation ; this translation
is m u l tiple and confron ts us with a paradox : plurality of authors.
The true au thor of a poem is neither the poe t nor the reader,
but language . I don't mean that language eliminates the reality
of the poet and the reader, but that i t includes and engu l fs
them. Poet and reader are two existential moments-i f one may
express it like this-of language . If it is true tha t they u se lan
guage to speak, i t is also true that language speaks through them.
The i d ea of the world as a moving text ends, as I said b e fore , in
the plurali ty of tex ts; the idea of the poet as translator or
decipherer leads to the d isappearance of the author. But it was
the twentieth-century poets, not B audelaire, who made a poetic
method out of this paradox .
__
Analogy is the science of correspondences. I t is, however, a

scien ce which exists only by virtue of d i fferences. Precisely
because this is not that , it is possible to e x tend a bridge between
thi s and that. The bridge is the word like , or the word is : this
is like that , this is that. The bridge does not do away w i th
72
distance : it is an in termediary ; neither does it eliminate d iffer

ences : it establishes a relation between different terms. Analogy
is the m etaphor in which otherness dreams of itse ! f as unity ,
and d i ffere nce projects itself illusively as identi ty .j By means of

analogy the confused land scape of plurali ty becom es ordered
and intelligible. A nalogy is the opera tion by means of which ,
thanks to the play of similarities, w e accept differences.
Analogy does not eliminate differences : it redeems them, it
makes their existence tolerable. E ach poet and each reader is a
soli tary consciousness : analogy is the mirror in which they
are reflected . And so, analogy does not imply the unity of the
world , b u t its plurality , no m an 's sameness, b u t his perpe tual
splitting away from himself. _Analogy says that every thins
is the metaphor of something else , but in the sphere of identity
.there are no metaphors. Differences are obliterated in unit_x: ,
,2_nd o therness d isappears. The word "like" fades away : being is
identical with i t self. The poetics of analogy could appear onlY,
1
in a socie t y based o n criticism a n d eaten away b y i t . To the

------.
modern world of rectilinear time and infinite d ivisions, to the

time of change and history , analogy opposes not an im possible
i ty b u t the mediation of a metaph or. Analogy is poetry
a of confronting o thernes
The two ex tremes which tear apart the consciousness of the
modern poet app gr in B!Jelaire with the same lucid ity-with
the same ferocity. Modern poetry , he tells us time and again,
is bizarre beauty : unique , singular, irregular, new. It is not
Classical regularity but Romantic originality : i t is unre pe a table
and not e ternal-it is mortal . It belongs to re ctilinear t ime :
it is each day 's novelty. I ts o ther name is unhappiness, aware-
73
Analogy and Irony
ness or finiteness. The grotesque, the strange , the bizarre , the

original , the singular, and the u nique - all these names from
Romantic and Sym bolist aesthe tics are only different ways of
saying the same word : death\ In a world where iden tity

,
Christian e terni ty- h as disap peared , death becomes the great
excep tion which absorbs all others and elimin a tes rules and
laws. The cure for the universal exception is twofold : irony, the
aesthe tics of the grotesque, the bizarre and the unique ; analogy,
the aesthetics of corresponden ces .' Irony and !lll9gy a re
irreconcilable . The first is the child of linear, sequential, and
unrepeatable time ; the second is the manifestation of c yclical
time : the future is in the past and both are in the prese n t .
Analogy turns irony into one m ore variant of the fan o f sim ilari
ties, but irony splits the fan in two. I rony is the wound through
which analogy bleeds to death ; it is the exception, the fatal
accident (in the double meaning of the term : necessary and
deadly) . I rony shows that if the universe is a script , ea ch
translation of this script is di fferent, and that the concert of
correspond ences is the gibberish of Babel . The poetic w ord ends
in a h owl or in silence : irony is not a word , nor a speech, but
the reverse of the word , noncommunication . The universe, says
irony, is not a scri p t ; if i t were , its signs wou ld be inco mprehen
sible for man , because in it the word d eath does not ap pear,
and m an is m ortal.
In an oft-quotea sonnet, "Correspondences," B audelai!e said,
Nature is a temple of living pillars
where often words emerge , confused and dim ;
and m an goes through this forest, with familiar
eyes of sym bois always watching him .
74
The words these tree-columns say are confused : man p asses

through these verbal and seman tic forests without fully under
standing the language o f things . w__ h y lost the secre t of
the cosmic language which is the key t anal ()gy. Fourier
innocently said he read in the "magic book" of Nature , but
Baudelaire confesses that he understands the writing o f this
book only confusedly. The metaphor which consists in_ eing
tpe _l.!_!livr s a book is very ancien t and appears also in the
last canto of Dante's Paradise . The p oe t gazes upon the mystery
of the T rinity, that is, the paradox of otherness, which is unity
and is still otherness :
I n that abyss I saw how l ove held bound
I n to one volume all the leaves whose flight
I s scat tered through the universe around ;
How substance, accident and m od e u nite
Fused, so to speak, together, in such wise
That this I tell of is one simple l igh t.
The p lu ralities of the worl d - leaves blown here and there -come
to rest together in the sacred book ; substance and acci dent
in the end are j oined. Everything is a reflection of that unity,
not excluding the words of the poet who names it. I n the next
tercet , the u nion of substance and accident is presented a s a
kno t , and this knot is the universal form enclosing all forms.
This knot is the hieroglyph of divine love . Fourier would
say that this love is none other than passional attraction . B u t
Fourier, l i k e a l l o f u s , d oes not know wha t this center i s , nor of
what it is m ade. His analogy , like Baudelaire 's and tha t of the
75
Analogy and I rony
moderns, is an operation , an "ars combinatori a " ; Dan te's

analogy is based on an ontology . The heart of analogy is an
empty space for us ; this center for D an te is a knot, i t i s the
Trinity which reconciles the One and the Many , substance and
accide n t . There fore , he knows-or thinks he knows-th e secret
of analogy , the key with which to read the book of the universe ;
this key is another book : the Holy S criptures. The modern
poet k nows-or thi nks he knows-precisely the contrary : the
world is illegible, there is no book. Negation , cri ti cism , irony,
these also consti tute knowledge, though of the opposi te kind to
Dante 's. A knowledge which i s not the contemplati on of
otherness from the vantage point of unity , but the visi on of
the breaking away from uni ty . An abysmal knowledge , an
ironi c knowledge.
Mallarme closed this peri od and by so doing, opened our own.
He closed it with the same metaphor of the book . In h i s youth ,
in the years o f i solation i n the provinces, he had the vi sion of
the Work, a work he compared to tha t of the alchemists, whom
he called "our forefathers. " In 1 8 66 he confided to his friend
Cazali s : "I have confronted two abysm s : one is Nothingness,
which I reached withou t knowing Buddhism . . . the o ther is the
Work . " The work : poetry confron ting nothingness. And he
added : "perhaps the title of my volume of lyri c poe try will be
The Glory of th e Lie , or The Glorious L ie . " The ti tle is reveal

ing : M allarme wan ted to resolve the opposition betwee n
analogy and irony . H e accepted the reality of nothingness- the
world of otherness and of irony is, after all, the manifestation of
nothingness-bu t at the same time he accepted the rea l i ty of
analogy , the reali ty of the poe tic work . Poetry as the m ask of
76
nothingness. The u niverse resolves itsel f in a book : an imper

sonal poem which is not the work of the poet Mallarme, van
ished in the sp iri tual crisis of 1 86 6 , nor of anyone else . I t is
language which speaks through the poe t , who is now only a
transparency . Crystalliz ation of language in an impersonal work
which is not only the double of the universe , as the Romantics
and Symbolists had wished , but also its abolition . The nothing
ness whi ch is the world turns itself into a book : tlze Book .
Mallarme has left hundreds and hundreds of notes describing
the physical characteristics of this loose-leaved book ; the form
in which i ts leaves will be distribu ted and combined at every
reading so that each combination will produce a differen t
version o f the same tex t ; the ritual o f each read ing with the
number of participants and the price of entrance ; the edi tion and
sale of the book (odd calculations which remind us of Balzac
and his financial speculations) ; he has left refle ctions, confi
dences, doubts, fragments, odds and ends-but the book does
not exist ; it was never written. Analogy ends in silence .
-""
77
Analogy and Irony
T ran slation and Metaphor
In France the re was a R om an ti c literature - a style , an ideology ,

some gestures-bu t there was no real Romantic spirit u ntil the
second half of the nineteenth century, and this m ovem en t
was a rebellion against the French poetic tradition from the
Renaissance onward , against its aesthetic as much as against i ts
prosody ; whereas English and G erman Romanticism was a
rediscovery (or invention) of their national p oe tic trad i tions.
Wha t of Spain and her former colonies? Spanish Romanticism
was superfi cial and declamatory , patriotic and sen time n tal, an
imitation of F rench models, themselves bom bastic and derived
from England and Germ any. N o t the ideas, j us t the topics; not
the style , j ust the m anner ; neither the vision of the correspond
ence between the macrocosm a nd the microcosm , nor the
consciousness that the "I " is a faul t , a mistake in the system of
the u niverse . Not the irony , j u s t sentimen tal subjectivi ty. There
were Romantic attitudes and there were poets not devoid of
talen t and passion , who appropriated Byron 's gesticulations
(not his economy of language) and H ugo's grandi loquen ce (not
his visionary genius). Not one among the official names of
Spanish Romanticism is of the first rank, with the exception,
perhaps, o f M ariano J ose de Larra . But the Larra who fires our
78
imagina tions is a critic of his times and himself, a moralist

closer to the eighteenth century than to R omanticism, and the
au thor o f ferocious epigrams : "Here lies half of Spain ; it d ied
of the o ther half. " The Argen tinian Domingo Faustino
Sarmien to, visiting Spain in 1 84 6 , told the Spanish : "You
have no au thors nowadays, nor writers, nor any thing of any
value . . . you over here and we over there translate . " In Spain
they were imitating the French , and in Spanish America they
were imi tating the Spanish .
1 ose Maria Blanco White i s the only Spanish wri ter o f this
period who deserves to be called Romantic. His family was of

Irish origin , and one of his forefa thers hispanized the s urname
simply by translati ng i t : B lanco is White . I don 't know whether
Blanco White should be claimed for Spanish literature sin ce
most of his work was wri t ten in E nglish . He was a minor poet
and fittingly occupies a mod est and chosen spo t in som e
anthologies of English Romantic poetry . And yet , he was a
great critic in the fields of history , morals, politics, and l itera
ture. His reflections on Spain and Spanish America are still
vali d . B l anco White represents a key momen t i n the in tellectual
and political history of the Hispanic nations . He has su ffered
as much from the hatred of conservatives and national ists
as from our neglect : a large part of his work has not even been
translated into Spanish . Being intimately in touch w i th English
thought , he was the only Spanish cri tic to look at our poetic
tradition from the perspective of Romanticism : "Since B oscan
and Garcilasco introduced I talian verse-forms in the middle of
the six teenth century , our best poets h ave been slavish imitators
of Petrarch and the wri ters of that school . . . Rhyme , I talian
79
meters, and a certain false idea of poetic language which only

all ows them to speak of what o ther poets have spoken of, have
divested them of freedom of though t and expression . " I have
found no better or more concise description of the connection
between the Renaissance aesthetic and regular syllabic versifica
tion . Blanco Whi te not only criticizes eigh teenth-century poetic
models (French Classicism) , but indicates their origin : the
introdu ction of regular syllabic versification in the six teenth
century and , wi th i t , an i d e of beauty based on symmetry
_
rather than personal vision . His remedy is the same as Words
worth 's: to renounce "poetic l anguage" and use everyd ay
language , to "think for ourselves in our own language. " F or the
same reasons he laments continuing French influence : " I t is
an obvious m isfortune that Spaniards, because of the d i fficulty
of learning English , turn exclusively to French au thors . "
Two names seem t o d eny every thing I have said : Gu stavo
Adolfo Becquer and Rosalia Castro . The former is a poet
admired by all ; the latter is a writer no less i ntense than Becquer
and perhaps broader in scope and more energetic. (I hesitate
to say more "virile " ; energy is also womanly . ) Both are late
Romantics, la te even for tardy Spanish Romanticism . A lthough
contemporaries of M allarme, Verlaine, and Rimbau d , contem
porari es of Whitman, their work shows them impervious to the
movements that were shaking and changing their age . Neverthe
less, they are true poets who close the prattling p eriod of
Spanish Romanticism and make us l ong for a Romanti cism we
never had . J uan Ramon J imenez said that m odern poe try in
our language began with B ecquer. If this is so, it was too timid a
beginning : the Andalusian poet reminds us too much o f
80
Hoffmann and, conversely , of Heine. Neither Becquer nor

Rosalia Castro marks the end of o ne period or the dawn of
another; they live i n a twiligh t zone and do not on their own
consti tu te an epoch .
Although Romanticism came late to Spain and Span i sh
America , the problem i s n o t just chronological . This i s not a
new example of the "hi storical backwardness of Spai n , " that
phrase u sed to explain the odd i ties of our na tions, our eccen
tricity. Is the poverty of our Romanticism one more chapter
on thi s theme for dissertations or elegies called "Spanish
decadence "? I t ,d epends on our idea of the relation between
art and history J, Who can den y tha t poetry i s a product of
history? It is also ovrsimplification to consider it merely a
\
reflection of history . IT'he relation be tween them i s more

subtle and more com'plex . Blake said "Ages are all Equal bu t
Genius i s A lways Above the Age . " S o ex treme a point of view
is not necessary ; it is enough to recall tha t eras we regard as
decaden t are frequently rich in great poe t s : Gongora and
Quevedo coincide w i th Philip I I I and Philip IV , M allarme lived
in the Second Empire , Li Po and Tu Fu saw the collap se of
the T'ang. So I shall try to outline a hypothesis which considers
the reality of history as m u ch as the reality of poetry , i tself
relatively autonomous.
Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenmen t, and
was therefore determ i ned by i t ; it was one of its con tradi ctory
products. An attempt of the poetic imagination to rek indle
souls desolated by critical reason , a search for a pri n ciple
differen t from religion and a negation of the sequential time
of revolutions Romanticism is the other face of modern i t y : its
81
Translation a n d M etaphor
remorse , its delirium, its nostalgia for a word m ade fle sh.
Romantic ambiguity : i t glorifies the powers and facult ies of
the child , the madma n , the woman , the nonrational o th er, but
glorifies them from the point of view of the modern era. The
primitive does not recognize himself as such nor does he want
to be primitive;\ Baudelaire goes into raptures a t the "canni
balism " of Delacroix precisely in the name of "modern beau ty . "

In Spain this reaction against the modern age could n o t appear,
becau se actually Spain did not have a modern age : she had
neither critical reason nor bourgeois revolution , nei ther Kant
nor R obespierre .1 This is one of the p aradoxes of our history .
The discovery and conquest of America were no less d etermining
factors i n the formation of the modern era than was the Refor
mation : i f the latter provided the ethical and social bases for
capitalist development , the former opened the doors t o E uro
pean expansion and made possible the primitive a ccumulation
of capital in proportions u nknown till tha t tim e :j t t_h_e
'
nations which opened the era of expansion, Spa 1 n and Portugal,
remained on the fria pitalist d evelopment and did
not share in the Enlightenmen t . Since this exceeds the limits

of my subject I will not deal with it here ; it is enough t o recall
that from the seventeenth century on Spain became m ore and
more enclosed within herself and that this isolation gradually
resulted i n petri fication . Neither the action of a small elite
of intellectuals nurtured by eighteenth-century French culture
nor the revolutionary shocks of the nineteenth century suc
ceeded in changing her. On the contrary , the Napoleonic
invasion strengthened monarchical absolu tism and ultramon
tane Catholicism .
82
Spain's isolation was followed , brusquely and immed iately ,

by a rapid decline of poetry , literature , and art . Why? Seven
teenth-century Spain produced great dramatists, novel ists,
lyric poe ts, and theologians. It would be absurd to attribu te the
ensuing decadence to genetic mu tation. Spaniards did not
suddenly become stupid i each generation produ ces more or

less the same number of i htelligen t people ; what changes is the
relation between the aptitudes of the new generation a nd the
possibilities offered it by historical and social circumstances.
During the seven teenth century Spaniards could not change the
{
intellectu a l , moral , and artisti c suppositions on which their

society was based , nor could they take part in the general
movement of European culture : in either case the danger to
dissidents was a mortal one . Therefore , the second half of the
seven teenth century was a time of recombining elemen ts, forms,
and ideas, a continuous returning to the same point to say the
same thi ng . The aesthetic of surprise ends in what Cald eron
called the "rhetoric of silence . " A resound ing emptiness. The
Spanish consumed themselves. As Sor Juana says, "They m ade a
monume n t of their destru ction . "
With their reserves exhausted , Spaniards cou ld choose no
path other than imitation . The history of each litera tu re and
each art , of each culture , can be d ivided into fortunate and
unfortunate i@itations. The former are productiv e : they change
the person who imitates and they change what is imita ted ;
the latter are sterile : Spanish imitation was of the second kind.
The eighteenth-cen t ury was a critical century but criticism
was forbidden in Spain . The ad option of the French N eoclassi
cal aesthetic was an act of ex ternal imitation which did not
83
Translation a n d Metaphor
change the deep reality of Sp ain , or rather, left both p sychic

and social structures intact g_t)l_ntic_ism was the reaction
of bourgeois consciousness to and against itself-against i ts own
cri tic! p_ro c !ion : t l e Enligh tenmen.!JI_n Spain the m iddle
_
_
class and the intellectuals voiced no cri ticism of traditi onal
{8
--- - - - -
----
__,
institu tions or, if they did , it was insufficient . How cou l d they
cri ticize a modern era which they never had? Heave n , as the
Spanish saw i t , was not the desert which terrified Jean Paul
and Nerval , but a place full of sugary virgins, chubby a ngels,
beetle-browed apostles, and vengefu l archangels-a fairground
and an implacable court of law . Yes, Spanish R omanti cs
rebelled against this heaven ; bu t their rebellion, histori cally
j ustifiable, was Roman tic only in appearance. Spanish Roman
ticism , in an even more obvious way than French , l acks this
element of originality , completely new in the history o f Western
sensibili ty -this dual element that we cannot avoid calling
demoniacal : the vision of universal analogy and the ironic vision
of man . Correspondence among all worlds and , a t the center,
the burn t-ou t su n of death .
Spanish Ameri can Romanticism was even more desti tute than
Spani sh Romanticism : the re flection of a reflection . H owever,
a historical circumstance affected our poetry , though n o t imme
diately , and made it change direction . I am referring to the
Revolu tion of I ndependence. ( I really should use the p lural, for
there were various revolu tions, not all with the same m eaning,
bu t to avoid unnecessary complications I will deal with them as
if they constitu ted a unified moveme n t . ) The Revolution of
Independence in Spanish America was the revolution the
Spanish never had , the revolution which failed time and again
84
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries . Ours was a movement

inspired by the two great political archetypes of the m odern
era : the French Revolu tion and the American Revolu tion. One
might even say that in this era there were three great revolu tions
wi th analogous ideologies : the French , the North American,
and the Spanish American . Although all three succeed ed, the
resu lts were very d ifferent : the first two created new societies,
whereas ours initiated the desolation which has marked our
..
history from the nineteen th century until today . Our principles

were those of the Americans and the French , our armies defea ted
the Spanish absolu tists, and as soon as Independence w as
achieved R epublican governments were set up in our lands.
And yet the movement failed : it did not change our societies
and our liberators enslaved us.
Unlike the American Revolution, ours coincided with a state
of extreme decadence in the seat of Empire . There are two
attendant but not identical phenomena : the tendency of the
Spanish Empire to fragment i tself-a consequence of Hisp anic
decadence as much as Napoleonic invasion -and the movements
toward autonomy of the Spanish A merican revolu tion aries.
Independence hastened the d ismemberment of the Empire. The
men who headed the liberation m ovements, wi th a few excep
tions, lost no time in carving out nations to sui t their own ends :
the frontiers o f each new coun try reached a s far as did the
army of the local chief. Later, oligarchies and militarism , in
conju nction with foreign powers and especially North American
imperialism , would complete the atomization of Spanish A merica .
The new countries went on being the old colonies ; social
con ditions remained unchanged , but now reality was hidden
85
under layers of liberal and democratic rhe toric. Like false

fronts, Republican institutions hid the old horrors and wretched
ness.
The groups which challenged Spanish power used the revolu
tionary ideas of the time but were neither able nor willing t o
change o u r society : Spanish America w a s a Spain without
Spain. As Sarm iento put i t : the governments of Spanish America
'
were the "executors of Philip I I 's will . ' i Feudalism disguised as
bourgeois liberalism, absol!J tism without a monarch but with
1
petty kings-the presidents/: And so the_ kingdom of the mask

was b orn, tl_!e eq1pire of li e s . From then on the corruption of
__
language , the semantic infectio n , became an endemic malad y ;

lies became constitutional , consubstantial . Thence com es the
signifi cance of cri ticism in our coun tries, Philosophical and
historical criticism for us is not only an i n tellectu al fu n ction ; i t
i s like psychoanalysis. I t is theory and praxis. I f there is one
urgen t task in Spanish Ameri ca it is the criticism of our histori
cal and political myths.
Not all the consequences of the Revolu tion of Independence
were negative . I t freed us from Spain ; and , if it did no t change
social reality , i t changed our consciousness. I t discredi ted
forever monarchic absolutism and ul tramon tane Catholicism .
The separa tion from Spain w as an act of demythification : we
were haunted by beings of flesh and blood , not the ghosts who
kep t the Spanish awake . Or were they the same ghosts with
different names? In any case , the names changed and w ith them
the ideology of the Spanish Americans. The rift with S panish
tradi tion widened in the first half of the nineteen th ce n tury ,
and i n the second half became a clean break. The divi d i ng knife
86
was posi tivism . During these years the ruling classes and in tel
lectual groups of Latin America discovered positivistic philoso
phy and embraced it en thusiastically . We changed the masks of
Danton and 1 efferson for those of A uguste Comte and Herbert
Spencer. On the al tars built by liberals to liberty and reason
were placed science and progress, surrounded by their mythic
creatures : the railroad and the telegraph. At tha t moment the
paths of Spain and Spanish America diverged . The cult of
positivism grew to become the offi ci al ideology , if not religion ,
of the governments of B razil and Mexico ; in Spain the best
of the dissidents sought an answer to their anx ieties in the
doctrines of an obscure German ideal ist thinker, Karl Christian
Friedri ch Krause . No divorce could be more complete.
Positivism i n Latin America was not the ideology of a liberal
bourgeoisie interested in industrial and social progress, as i t
was in E urope, b u t o f a n oligarchy o f big landowners. I t was a
mystification , a sel f-decei t as well as a deceit . A t the same time
i t w as a radical criticism of religion and of traditional i d e ol ogy .
Positivism did away with Christian mythology as with rationalist
philosophy . The resul t might be called the dismantling of
metaphysics and religion . This devel opment w as similar to the
eighteenth-century Enligh tenmen t ; the intel lectual classes of
Latin America lived ou t a crisis to a certain ex tent analogous to
tha t which had tormented Europeans a century earlier. F aith
in science became tinged with nostalgia for the old religious
certainties, and the belief in progress with vertigo at the pros
pect of nothingness. I t was not complete moderni ty b u t i ts
bitter foretaste : the vision of an u ninhabited heaven , the
dread of contingency .
87
Toward 1 880 the literary movement called Modenzismo

appeare d in Spanish America. Let me clarify my terms : Spanish
American modernism o is, to a certain extent , the equivalent of
French Parnassianism and Symbolism , and so has no connection
with what in English is called "modernism ." M odernism refers
to the li terary and artistic movements that began i n the second
decade of the twentieth century ; as used by North American
and English cri tics, it is what in France and the Hispanic coun
tries we call vanguardia , the avant-gard e . To avoid con fusion
I will use "modernismo" to refer to the Spanish American
movement ; in speaking of the a rtistic and poetic movements of

the twentieth century I will use "avant-gard e ' ' and "vanguard ,"
and for Anglo-A merican poe try , "modernism . "
M odernismo was the answer t o positivism , the criticism of
sensibility - the heart and also the nerves-to empiricism and
positivistic scientism . In this sense its histori cal function was
similar to that of the Roman tic reaction in the early d a ys
of the n ineteenth cen tury . Modernismo was our real R omanti
cism and , like French Symbolism , its version was not a repeti
tion but a metaphor : the o th er Roman ticism . The connection
between positivism and modernismo is histori cal and psycho
logical . We risk not understanding the nature of this relation i f
we forget that Latin American positivism , more than a scientific
method , was an ideology and a belief. I ts influence on the
development of science was much less than i ts dominion over
the minds and sensibilities of intellectual groups. Our c ritics
and historians have been insensitive to the contradictory dia
lectic uniting positivism and modernismo. Conseque ntly , they
insist upon seeing the latter only as a literary trend and , above
88
Child ren of the M ire
all, as a cosmopolitan and rather superficial style. No, modern

ismo answered spiritual need s . Or, m ore precisely , it was the
--
r o f imagination and sensibility to the posi tivist drought.

Only becaus it answered needs of the soul could it be a true
..
""
.-10- -
..;.
,.__ .,
poetic m ovement-the only one , in fact , among all those i n ou r

inguage during the nineteenth century , worthy o t the name.
The charge of superficiali ty can be m ore j ustly leveled at those
cri tics who could n ot read within the l ightness and cosmo
politan spirit of the modernista poets the signs (the stigmata) .
of spiritual exile.
For the same reason critics have been unable to expl ain
fully why the modernista movement, which began as a voluntary
adaptation of French poetry to our language , should h ave
originated in Spanish America rather than in Spain. Certainly
Spanish A mericans have been and are m ore sensitive to what is
happening in the world than the S panish, less imprisoned
within trad ition and history. But this explanation is weak . Lack
of informa tion on the p art of the Spanish? Rather, lack o f
need. From Independen ce onward , and especially from the

adoption of p ositivism , the intellectual beliefs of the S panish
Americans differed from those of the Spaniards. Diffe rent
tradi tions demanded differen t responses. Among us m odernismo
was the response needed to contradict the spiritual vacuum
created by the p ositivistic criticism of religion and metaphysics ;
nothing was more natural than that Spanish American poets
should be attracted by the French p oetry of this peri o d . They
discovered in it not only the novelty of a language but a sensi
bility and an aesthetic impregnated with the analogical vision of
the R omantic and occu ltist traditions. I n Spai n , on the con-
89
Translation and M e taphor
trary , the rationalisti c deism of Krause was not so much a

cri ticism as a substitute for religion-a timid philosophical
religion for the use of dissident liberals-and therefore modern
ismo lacked the compensatory function it had in Span ish
America. When m odern ismo finally reached Spain , some con
fused i t wi th a mere li terary import from France . From this
mistaken interpretation , that of Unamuno, stems the i dea of the
superficiality of the modernista poets of Spanish America ;
others such as J uan R amon J imenez and An tonio M achado
transposed it i n to the term s of the spi ri tual tradition in vogue
among the dissident intellectual groups. In Spain modernismo
was not a vision of the world but a language in teriorized and
transmu ted by two great Spanish poets: Antonio Mach ad o and
Juan R am on Jimenez (see Note 2 ) . Agai n : a translation and a
metaphor.
Between 1 8 80 and 1 8 90, almost wi thout knowledge of each
other, scattered throughou t the continent-in H avan a , Mexico
Ci ty , Bogota, Santiago de Chile , Buenos Aires, New York-a
handfu l of young men began the great change . The cen ter of
this scattered fraternity was Ruben Dario , liaison offi cer,
spokesman , and animator of the movemen t . In 1 8 8 8 D ario
coined the word modernismo to describe the new tend encies.
Modernism o : myth of the mod ern age , or rather its m irage.
What is i t to be modern? I t is to leave one 's house , cou n try, and
l an guage in search of some thing indefinable and unattainable,
for i t is confused with change: "He runs, he seeks. What d oes he
seek? " Baudelaire wonders . And he replies : "He seeks something
that we could call modernity . " But B audelaire does not define
that elusive modern i ty and is content to call it the "singular
90
element in every beauti ful thing. "lJhanks to modernity, beauty

is not one bu t many. M odernity d istinguishes today's w orks
from yesterday 's, makes them different : " the beautifu l is
,!!w ays strange . " M odernity is tha t element which , by making

i t u niqu e , gives life to beau ty . But this l i fe-giving process is
a condemn ation to capital punishment : m od erni ty is the m ark
of death The modernity which seduced the young poets at

the close of the century is very different from that which
seduced their fathers ; i t is not called progress nor are its out
ward manifestations the railroad and the telegraph ; it is called
l;;ry and its signs are useless and beautiful objects. Their
modernity is an aesthetic in which desperation is linked with
narcissism , and form with death
The ambivalence of the Roman tics and Symbolists i n the

face of the modern age reappears in the Spanish American
modern istas. Their love of luxury and the useless object is a
cri ticism o f the world in which i t is their l o t to l ive, b u t this
criticism is also a homage . Nonetheless, there is a radical
between Europeans and Spanish Americans : when

,difference
Baudelaire indicts progress a "a grotesque idea," or when
Rim baud denou nces industry; their experiences of progress and
industry are real , direct, whereas those of the Spanish Ameri cans
are derivative . only experience ..of the modern age which a
Spanish A merican could have in those days was of imperialism .
-
The reality of our nations was not a modern one : not industry ,
democracy , o r bourgeoisie, only feudal oligarchies a n d mili

tarism . The modernistas d epended on the very thing they
abhorred ; they swung between rebellion and abjecti o n . Some,
like M arti, were incorruptible and were sacrificed ; o thers like
91
poor Daria, wro te odes and sonnets to tigers and alliga tors
in ep aulets . B u t we who have seen and heard many great poets
sing the lofty deeds of Stalin in French , German , and S panish
can forgive Daria for having wri t ten some stanzas in praise of
Zelaya and Estrada Cabrera, two Central Ameri can satraps.
An antimodern modernity , an ambiguous rebeJlion, mod ern
ism a was an act opposing tradition and , in its first stage , a
denial of a certain Sp anish tradi tion. ( I say a certain tradi tion
because at a second stage the modernistas discovered the other
Spanish tradi tion , the real one . ) Their Gallic passion was a
form of cosmop olitanism ; Paris was the center of an aesthetic,
rather than the capital of a nation . Their cosmopolitanism led
them t o discover o ther literatures and to re-evaluate our I ndian
past . The exaltation of the pre-Hi spanic world , an aesthetic
first and foremost, was at the same time a criticism of the
modern age , especially of North American p rogress : Prince
Ne tzahualcoyotl confron ting Edison . In this they were also
following Baudelaire , who had described the believer i n progress
as "a poor wretch Americanize d by zoocratic i nd ustri a l phi loso
phers . " The recovery of the Indian world and , later on , of the
Spanish past , coun terbalanced the admiration, fear, and anger
evoked by th Uni!ed States and i ts policy oLd ominat ! on
in Latin America Admiration for the originali ty and might

of North American culture vied with fear and anger at the
repeated interve n tion of the United States in the life of our
nations. I have referred to the phenomenon elsewhere ; here I
will only emphasize that the an ti-imperialism of the m odernistas
was not exclusively based on political and econmnic grounds
but on the idea tha t Latin America and Anglo-Saxon A merica
92
Children of t h e M ire
represe n t two differen t and probably irreconcilable versions

of Western civilization. The conflict was not only between
classes and economic and social systems but between two visions
of the world and of man .
Romanticism attem p ted a timid reformation of Spanish verse
forms, b u t it was the modernistas who , by carryi ng it t o
extremes, finally succeeded . The me trical revolution o f the
modernistas was no less radical and decisive than that of
Garcilaso and the I talianizers of the six teenth century , although
in the reverse direction. Contrary and unforeseeable conse
quences of foreign influences, I talian in the six teenth century
and French i n the nineteenth century : in one case regular
syllabic versification triumphed , while in the other continuous
rhy thmic experimentation p rovoked the reappearance of
traditional meters and , above all, brough t abou t the resurrection
of accen tual versification . A t the beginning of the nine teen th
century Andres Bello, against the d octrine prevalent in Spain,
had shown that Spanish verse depended not so much o n syllabic
regularity as on the p lay of tonic accents. (Here I must point
out that it was Pedro Henriquez Urena, the first Spanish
American to hold the Charles Eliot Norton chair, who admirably
compiled and systematized this d octrine . ) Although the
modernistas a lso devoted theoretic studies t o the matter, i t was
their practice rather than their ideas that changed our verse.
The modernista revolution resu l ted i n the rediscovery of the
original rhy thms of our poetry . I t s cosmopolitanism was in fac t
a re turn to the true Spanish tradi tion , denied o r forgotten
in Spai n .
I have already indicated the connection be tween accentual
93
versifi ca tion and the analogical vision of the worl d . The new
rhythm s of the m odernistas brought abou t t e reappearance of
the original rhythmic p rinciple of the language ; this resurrection
of meters coincided wi th the appearance of a new sensibility,
which eventu ally proved to be a re turn to the o th er re ligion :
\f._q_!_i c rhytm is none other than a manifesta tion of
anal ogY{
the uni versal rhy thm . Analogy is a rhythmic vision of the
universe ; before becomi ng an i d ea , it is a verbal experience. If

the poet hears the universe as a language , he also u tters the
universe . As B audelaire says, G od uttered i t . Return to cyclical
time : the words of the poe t , even when they do not expressly
deny
1ristiani ty , dissolve i t into vaster and m ore ancient
beliefs . Christianity is no m ore than one of the combina tions of

universal rhythm . Christ's passi on , as some poem s by D ario say
unequ ivocally , is no more than a__momentary im age in the
rotation of ages and mythologieS} Anal ogy comes to rest in
syncre ti sm . This non-Christian te was absolutely new in
Hispanic poetry .
The i n fluence o f the occultist tradition among Spani sh
Ameri can modernistas was no less profound than among
European Romantics and Sym bolists. Our critics, although
aware o f this fact, seem to avoid i t, as though it were shamefu l .
Although scandalous, it is true : from Blake to Yeats and
Pessoa , the history of modern p oe try in the West is bound to
the history of hermetic and occult doctrines, from Swedenborg
to Madame Blavatsky. The influence of the Abbe Con s tant,
alias Eliphas Levi , was decisive not only on Hugo but o n
Ri mbauct
(rhe remarkable affinities between Fourier a nd Levi ,
accord ing to Andre B re ton , are to be explai ned because both
94
"place themselves in a vast curren t of thought which we can

trace back to the Zohar and which disperses itself in th e
Illuminist schools of the eigh teenth and nineteenth cen turies.
I t is a trend of though t found in the idealist systems, i n G oethe
and , in general , in all who refuse to posit mathematical iden tity

- as the unifying ide f t he wori
(A rcane 1 7 ) . We know tha t
the Spanish American modernistas- Dario , Lugones, Nervo ,

Tablada-were interested i n occultist writings. Why has our
cri ticism never pointed ou t the rela tion between I lluminism and
the anal ogical vision , and between the latter and me tri cal
reform? Rationalist scrup les, or Christian scruples? In any case
the relation is obvious. Modernismo began as a search for verbal
rhy thm and e nded in a vision of the universe as rhythm .
Ruben Daria 's beliefs vacillated , as we see in an oft-quoted
line from one of his poems, "between the cathedral and the
pagan rui n s . " I ven ture to modify i t : between the ruins of the
cathedral and paganism . Daria's beliefs, and th ose of m ost of
the modernista poets are , more than beliefs, the search for a
belief, and they evolve amid a landscape l aid waste by cri ti cal
reason and positivism . In this con text p aganism means not only
Greco-R01nan antiquity and its ruins but a living paganism :
on one hand , the body, on the other, Nature . AnalQiY and the
.
---..-v.A
body are two extremes of the satne belief in Nature

. This
u
affirm ation opposes posi tivistic and scien tific materialism as
M
much as i t does Christian spirituality. Ruins of the cathedral :

the idea of sin , the awareness of death , the knowledge tha t man
is fallen and exiled in this world and in the nex t, the vision of
oneself as an accidental being in a world of con tingency. _ No t a
system of beliefs but a handful of fragments and obsessions.
95
Th e modernista tragi comedy is composed of a dialogue between

the body and death , analogy and irony . I f the psych ological
and m etaphysical terms of this tragicomedy are transla ted into
language , we find , not the opposition between regular syllabic
versifica tion and accentual versification , but the con tradiction ,
more marked and more radical , between verse and prose.
Analogy_j:u::ontit.l uously pli t open b y irony , and _verse by pros?

The paradox beloved by B audelaire reappears : behind the
.
'/
--
_,_
make-up of fashion, the grimace of the skulL,i,M odern art knows

itself to be mortal ; there is its m odernity . M o d ernismo becomes
modern when it gains awareness of its mortality , that is to say ,
when i t ceases to take i tsel f seriously, when it injects prose into
verse and makes poetry ou t of the criticism of poetry . This
ironic, volun tarily antipoetic and therefore more intensely
poetic note appeared precise ly at the apogee of modernismo
(Ruben Daria, Can tos de vida y esperanza , 1 905 ) and is
almost always linked with the image of death But it w as
Le opold a Lugones , not Daria , who initiated t he secon d
modernista revolu tion. With Lugones and his book L unaria
sen timen tal ( 1 909), Lafargue penetrated Hispanic poe try :

Symbolism in its anti-Symbolist mome n t .
O u r criticism calls the n e w tendency postmodernismo . This i s
n o t accurate . Postmodernism o was n o t what followed modern
ismo-whi ch was actually vanguardismo-but a criticism of
modernismo within the movement i tself. It was an i ndividual
reaction on the part of various poets. Another moveme n t did
not start with them ; modernismo ended with them. They were
i ts cri tical consci ousness, the consciousness of its ending.
Moreover, the characteristic fea tu res of these poe ts-irony,
96
colloquial language -already had appeared in the leading

modernista poets. Finally , there is li teral ly n o space , in a chrono
logical sense, for this pseudo-movemen t : if modernism o died
out around 1 9 1 8 and the vanguard ia began at abou t th at time,
where can we put the postmodenz istas? And yet the change
was remarkable. Not a change of values , but of attitudes.
Modernism o had populated the world with t ri t ons and mer
maids ; the new poets traveled on commercial ships and landed
in Liverpool, not Cytherea ; their poems were no l onger songs to
old or new Romes b u t descriptions, rather bitter and re ticen t,
of middle-class districts ; nature was not the j u ngle or the desert
bu t the village wi th i ts orchards, i t s priest and his "nie ce, " i ts
girls "fresh and humble like humble cabbages. " Irony and
prosiness : the conquest of the p oe try of daily l ife . F or Daria
poets are the "towers of God " ; Lopez Velarde sees himself
walking down an alleyway talking to himself; the poe t as a
sublime , grotesque wretch , a sort of Charlie Ch aplin "avant
Ia lettre . " Aesthetics of the minimal, the near-to-hand , the
familiar. The great discovery : the secre t power of colloquial
language. This discovery admirably served the purpose of
Lugones and Lopez Velarde : to m ake the poem a psychological
equation , a meandering m onologue in which refle ction and
lyricism , song and irony , prose and verse are fu sed together and
separate , gaze at each other and a re fused again . The song is
broken , the poem becomes an interrup ted confession , the
melody is punctuated by silences and gaps. Lopez Velarde put
it succinctly : "The poetic system has turned into a critical
system . "
For reasons which I noted earlier, Spanish poets-ex cep t
97
Ramon del Valle lnclan , unique in this as in so many o ther

thi ngs-could not make use of what constituted the tru e and
secret originality of modernismo : the a na logical vision inheri ted
from the Roman tics and the Sym bolists. However, they imme
diately adopted the new language , rhythms, and me trical forms.
Unamuno, for example, closed his eyes to these shining novelties
which he judged frivolous. He closed his eyes but not his ears;
meters rediscovered by modernistas reappear frequently in
his verses. Unamuno's rejection is part of moderniso ; i t is not
what went beyond Dado and Lugones but what confro n ted
them . In his rejection Unamuno found the tone of his poetic
voice, and in this voice Spain found the grea t Romanti c poet
she lacked in the nineteenth century . Although he sho u ld have
been the predecessor of the modernistas, Unam uno wa s their
contemporary a nd their complementary antagonist. Withou t the
modernistas, Unamuno could not have been the poet we know .
Poetic j ustice .
Spanish modernism o - 1 am thinking primarily of Valle
Inclan , An tonio Machado, and J uan Ramon J imenez-has more
than one point of contact wi th Span ish Ameri can post modern
ismo : criticism of stereotyped a t ti tudes and precious cliches,
repugnance t oward falsely refined language, re ticence toward
antiquarian symbolism , search for a pure poe try (Jimenez) or an
- -
- - ----------
--
essen tial poetry (Machado). There is a surprising similarity

between the volun tary colloquialism of Lugones, Lopez
Velard e , and some of the poems of A n tonio M achado's first
volume (Soledades , second edition, 1 90 7 ) . But soon the paths
diverge ; Spanish poets were less interested in exploritg _th
poetic potential of colloquial speech -the music of conversation,
98
Eliot called it-than in renewing the melod ies of tradi tional

-
poetry . The two grea t Spanish poets of this period always

con fu sed spoken language with p opular poetry . The latter is a
Romantic fiction (Herder's ''Song of the People") or a literary
survival ; the former is a reali ty , the living language of modern
cities, with i ts barbarisms, its foreign words, its technical
expressions, i ts neologisms. I n its early stages Spanish modern
ismo coi ncided with postmodernista reaction against the
literary language of Spanish America's first modernism o ; later
this opposition developed into a return to the Spanish poetic
tradition : the song, the ballad , the copla. Thus, the Spanish
confirm modernism o 's Romantic nature , but at the same time
they cut themselves off from the poetry of modern life . During
these years Fernando Pessoa, through the voice of his hetero
nym, Alvaro de Campos, wro te :
Don 't tell me there 's no poetry in business, in office s !

Why , i t seeps through every pore
. . I brea the i t i n the sea air
Because i t 's all got to do with ships and modern navigation,

Because invoices and commercial letters are the beginnings of
history . . .
(Translated by Edwin Honig)
If the beginning contains the end , a poem by one of the

initiators of modernismo, Jose M arti, sums up this m ovement
and announces contemporary poe try . The poem is a premoni
tion of his death in battle (in 1 8 9 5 ) , which i t men tions as a
necessary and , in a certain way, desired sacrifice .
99
Translation and Me taphor
Two Countries
I have two countrie s : Cuba and the nigh t .
O r are they both one? As the su n's m aj esty

fades from the sky , I see her, Cuba ,
dressed in veils, holding a carnatio n ,
like a widow, q u i e t , sad .
How well I know that bleeding flower
tremb ling in her hand ! My breast
is empty , it is destroyed and empty
where my heart was. I t is time now
to begin to die . The nigh t is good
for saying goodbye . Ligh t
hinders, and human words. The universe
speaks be tter than man.
Like a flag
that calls to battle, the red candle-flame
flares. Overflowing myself,
I open the windows. M u te , twisting
carnation petals , like a cloud

obscuring the sky, the widow Cuba passes . . .
(Translated by William Ferguson)
A poem without rhyme, written in hendecasyllables in ter

rup ted and broken by pauses for reflection , silences, h uman
breathing, and the breathing of the night . A monologue-poem
which escapes from song, an intermittent flow , a continuous
interpenetration of verse and prose. All the Romantic themes
appear in these few lines : the coun try and the night as two
I 00
wome q , death as the one and only woman , the one and only
abyss.;' Death , eroticism , revolutionary passion , poetry : the
nigh t , the great mother, contains it all. Earth mother but also
I
sex and common speech . The p oe t d oes not raise his voice,
he speaks to himself when he speaks to the night and t o revolu
tion . . Nei ther sel f-pity n or eloquence : " I t is t ime now I to
begin to die . The night is good I for saying goodbye . " I rony is
transfigured into a ccep tance of death . And , at the cen ter of the
poem , a phrase suspended between two lines, isolated in a
pause to emphasize its weight-a phrase which no other p oet in
our language could have w ri t ten before him (not Garcilaso,
nor San Juan de la Cru z , nor Gongora, nor Quevedo , n or Lope
de Vega) -because they were all p ossessed by the ghost o f
the Christian God and because they a l l faced the world as fallen
Nature - a phrase whi ch contains everything I have been t rying
to say : "The universe I speaks bet ter than man . "
I0I
Tra nslation and Metaphor
The Clos ing of the C ircle
The simi larities between Romanticism and the twentie th

cen tury avant-garde h ave been pointed out more than once .
Both are movements of the young ; both rebel against reason ,
its constructs and i ts values ; both grant a cardinal place to
the passions and visions of the body -eroticism , dream , inspira
tion ; both attempt the destru ction of visible reality in order
to find or invent another one , magical, supernatural , and more
than rea l . Two great historical d evelopments alternatel y fasci
nate and tear them apart : for R oman ticism , the French Revolu
tion , the Jacobin Terror, and the Napoleonic Empire ; for the
avant-garde , the Russian Revolution, the purges, and S talin's
despotic bureau cracy . I n Romanticism as in the avant-garde , the
" I " d e fends i tself from the world and finds i ts vengeance in
irony or in humor, weapons which destroy the attacker as well
as the attacked . The modern era denies and affirms i tself in
both movements. The artists as well as the critics were aware of
these affinities. The Fu turists, Dadaists, Ultraists, and Sur
realists all knew that their rejection of Romanticism was i tself
a romantic act, in the trad i tion which R omanticism itself had
inaugura ted , that tradition which seeks continuity through
rejection. But none of them realized the peculiar and t ruly
1 02
unique rela tion of the avant-garde with earlier poetic move

ments. All were conscious of the paradox ical nature o f their
rejection , namely , that as they denied the past they prolonged
it, and in so doing confinned i t ; none of them no ticed tha t ,
unl ike Romanticism , whose rejection initiated this tradition,
theirs brought one to a close . The avan t-garde is the grea t
breach , and with it the "tradition against itself" comes to an
end .
R evolu tion/Eros/Meta-irony
The m ost remarkable similarity between Romanticism and the
avant-gard e , the crucial point of similarity , is !e atte 111 pt to

unjte ]ife and art. Like Romanticism , the avan t-garde w s not
only an aesthetic and a language, b u t also an erotic and a
political frame of reference, a world-view, an action : a lifestyle.

The urge t o change reality appears among the Romantics j ust
as i t does in the avan t-garde , and i n both cases it branches off in
opposite yet inseparable d irections-magic and politics, religious
temptation and revolutionary tem p tation. Trotsky l oved avan t
garde art and poetry but he could not understand the attraction
which Andre B reton felt for the o ccul tist tradi tio1 1 Breton's
beliefs were no less strange and an ti-ra tiona] than Ese nin 's. When
the latter committed suicide, Tro tsky wrote in a briTHant and

impassioned article : "Our age is harsh, perhaps one of the
harshest in the history of civilized humanity , so-called . The
revolu ti onary is fiercely possessed by patriotic devotion to this
era , his only true motherland . Esenin was no revolutionary . . .
I 03
The Closing of the Circle
he was a lyricist, gazing inw a rd . Our era , on the other han d ,

i s n o t lyrical. This is the fund amen tal reason why Sergio Esen in,
of his own volition and so prematurely , has gone far from us
and from this age (Pra vda , 1 9 January 1 9 26). Four y ears later
Mayakovsky, who was no "inward-gazi ng lyricist " and who
was possessed by the revolutionary zeal of the era , also com
mitted suicide , and Trotsky had to write another article- this
time in the Bulletin of the R ussian Opposition (May 1 930).
",
/
The con trad iction between the era and i t s poetry , between the
revolutionary and the poetic sp irit, is vaster and deeper than
Trotsky though t. Russia provides an exaggerated bu t not
exceptional case . There the contradiction took atrocious shape :
poets who were not murdered or who did not commit suicide
were silenced by other means. The reasons for this heca tomb
derive from Russian history- that barbarous past to which
Lenin and Trotsky re ferred more than once-as much as from
Stal i n 's paranoid cruelty . B u t equally responsible is the bolshevik
spirit , heir to Jacobinism and its ex travagant pretensio ns con
cerning society and human nature .
"
1,
Poets reacted to the assault on Christianity by critica l philoso-
phy by becoming the channels through which the ancient

religious spirit , Christian and pre-Christjan , was transm itted.
Ana.J ogy , alchemy , magic , personal syncretisms, and m y tholo
giesJ A t the same time, insofar as they were affected by the
mo d ern , poe ts reacted against religion (and themselves) with
the weapon of irony. More than once -with irrj tation but not
without true insight-Trotsky pointed out religious elements in
the work of the majori ty of Ru ssian poets and writers of the
twen tie s - the so-called "fellow travelers . " A ll of the m , Trotsky
1 04
says, accept the October Revolu tion as a R ussian ra the r than

a revolu tionary fac t . What is Russian is the traditional and
religious world of the peasants and their old mythologies, " the
witches and their spells , " whereas the Revolution is the modern
age : science , technology , urban cu lture . To support his criti
cism he quotes from Pilniak 's Naked Year : "The witch Egorka
say s : ' Russia is wise in herself. Th e German is intelligent,
but half-wi tted . ' 'A nd wha t about Karl Marx ? ' asks one . 'He is
German , I tell you , and there fore a half-wit . ' 'And Lenin? '
'Lenin is a peasant, I mean a Bolshevik ; therefore you have to
be communists . . . ' " Trotsky concludes that "it is very d isturb
ing that Pilniak hides behind the witch Egorka and uses her
stupid language , even on behalf of the communists . " The early
sympathy of these writers toward the Revolu tion-as is true
for the Christian communism of B lok's Th e Twelve- "originates
in a conception of the world which is the least revolutionary ,
the most Asiatic, m ost passive, and most heavi1y imbued with
Christian resignation that can be imagined . " What would
Trotsky say if h e read the Russian poe ts and n ovelists of today,
equally possessed by that conception of the worl d , and now
devoid of revolutionary illusions?
Nor did Trotsky regard as comple tely revolutionary a group
which openly supported the Revolution, a branch of the pre
revolu tionary Futurism which , headed by M ayakovsky , founded
the LEF . "Futurism runs counter to m ysticism , to the passive
deification of Nature . . . And it favors technology , scien tifi c
organization , machines, social planning . . . There is a d irect
connection between this aesthetic 'rebelliousness' and social and
moral sedition . " But the Futurist rebellion had its roo ts i n
I 05
The Closing o f the Circle
ind ivid ualism : "The Futurists' exaggerated rejection of the past

comes not from revolutionary proletarianism but from B ohemian
nihilism . ' For this reason Mayakovsky 's devotion to the Revolu
tion , sincere though i t may have bee n , seems to Trotsky a tragic
mistake : "his subconscious feelings toward the city , Nature ,
the whole world , are no t those of a worker but of a bohemian .
The bald lamppost that takes off th e street 's stockings , a great
ima . reveals the poet's bohemian essence rather than anything
else. '1 Trotsky emphasizes "the cynical and shameless t one of
many images" of Mayakovsky and, with admirable perspicacity,
un covers their Romantic origin . "Those thinkers who , in
defining the social character of Fu turism in its origins" (he is
referring to the prerevolutionary period which was the most
produ c tive part of the movemen t ) , "place decisive imp ortance
on its violent protests against b ourgeois life and art , reveal
their own ingenuity and ignorance . . . The R omantics, both
French and German, always spoke caustically abou t b ourgeois
mora1 ity and its hidebound life . They let their hair grow long,
and Theophile Gautier wore a red waistcoa t . The Futurists'
yellow blouses are without doubt descend ants of the R omantic
waistcoat which aroused such horror among papas and mamas. "
How can we fail to recognise Romantic irony in the "cynicism
and individualistic rebellion" of M ayakovsky and his friends?
Russian literature of this epoch was torn between the "witches'
spells" and the Futurists' satire . Avatars, metaphors of analogy
and irony :
.
Trotsky s s cri ticism amounts t o a condemnation of poetry, not
only in the name of the R ussian Revolu tion but of the mod ern
spirit in genera l . He speaks as a revolutionary who has ad opted
1 06
the intellectual tradition of the mod ern age "back from M arx to
Hegel and to Adam Smi th and David Ricard o . " The roots of
this trad i tion lie the French Revol ution and the Enligh tenment.
And so his criticism of poe try , wi thout his entirely being
aware of i t , takes on the form of the criticism which philosophy
and science since the eighteenth century have made of the
religion, myths, m agic, and other beliefs of the pasL Nei ther
philosophers nor revolu tionaries can patiently tolera t e the
ambivalence of poets who see in m agic and revolu tion two
parallel but not mu tually exclusive methods of changing the
worl d . The passages of Pilniak quoted by Trotsky e cho what
was said earlier by Navalis and Rimbau d : magic operates in
a way not essentially different from th a t of revolution. The
magic vocation of modern poetry from B l ake to our own time
is only the other sid e , the d ark side, of i ts revolutionary voca
tion. Here l ies the basis of the m isunderstanding between
revolutionaries and poe ts, which no one has been able to
unravel. If the poet d isowns his m agic sid e , he d isowns poetry
and becomes a functionary and a propagandist . But m agic
devours its l overs, and a complete surrender to its powers can
lead to suicide . The l ure of death was called revolu tion by
Mayak ovsky ; by Nerval, magic . The poet never escapes the
double-edged facination ; his concern , l i ke that of
H rrv
M artin
son 's tightrope-walker, is " to sm ile over the abyss . "

The attack o n poetry brings o ther condemnations t o mind .
Wi th the same zeal that in the six teenth and seventeen th cen
turies the church used to punish mystics, illuminati, and
quietists, the revolu tionary state h as persecu ted poe ts . I f
poetry is the secre t rel igion of the mod ern age, politics i s its
I 07
The Closing of t h e Circle
public religion. A blood thirsty religion in disguise . The indict

men t of poetry has been a religious indictmen t : the revolu tion
has condem ned poetry as heresy) Two-fold consequence of

the twilight of traditional rel igion : if in poetry a personal ,
religious vision of the world and of man m an ifests itse l f, then
in revolu tionary politics a double religious aspiration appears : to

change human nature , and to institu te a universal church based
on a universal dogma. On the one hand analogy and irony ; on
the other, the transposing of dogmatic theology and escatology
to the realm of history and society . Jhe origins of the new
poli tical rel igion-a religion unaware
of itself-date back
....._..
to the
eighteenth
century . David Hume was first to notice it. He
-
showed that the philosophy of his con temporaries, especially
their cri ticism of Christiani ty , already contained the seeds of

another religion : to a ttribute an order to the u niverse and to
discover in this order a will and a finality meant incurring
religious illusion again . B u t al though he predicted i t , H ume did
not live to wi tness the descent of philosophy into politics
and i ts incarnation , in the religious meaning of the word , in
revolu bon. The epiphany of philosophic u niversal ism adopted
the dogmatic and bloody form of Ja cobinism and its c u l t of
t e goddess Reasm
!J
l_J t is n o coincidence that nineteenth- and
twentieth-cen tury
revolutionary movemen ts have gone hand in hand with d ogma

tism and sectarianism ; nor that, once in power, these m ovements
turn into inquisitions which periodically carry ou t cere monies
reminiscent of Aztec sacrifices and au tos de fe,. M arxism began
as a "cri ticism of heaven," that is to say , of the ideologies
of the ruling classes, bu t victorious Leninism transform ed this
1 08
cri ticism i n to a terrorist theology. The ideological heaven

descended to earth in the guise o ( the Cen tral Commit tee. The
-
Ch ristian drama between free will and divine predestination

reappears in the debate between freedom and social de termin
ism. Like Christian Providence , hi story reveals itself by signs :
-
"objective conditions," the "historical situation," and other

auguries and omens which the revolu ti onary m ust interpret .
This interpretation, like that of t h e Christian, is at once free
and d etermined by the social forces whi ch substitute for Divine
Providence . The exercise of this ambiguous freedom implies
mortal risks : to be in error, to confuse the v oice of God with
tha t of the Devil, for the Christian means the loss of his sou l ,
and for the revolu tionary , historical condemna tion. Nothing i s
more natural from this perspective than t h e deification of the
leaders : the sanctification of texts as holy wri tings is inevitably
followed by the sancti fication of their interpre ters and execu
tors . In this way the age-old need to worship and be worshiped
is satisfied . Suffering for the Revolu tion is the equivalent of
he tortures joyfully accepted by the Christian martyrs.
Baudelaire's max i m , slightly mod i fied , sui ts the twe ntieth
centu ry perfectly : the revolu tiona rjes have infused politics
i th the natu ral feroci ty of religiot (see Note 3
The opposi tion between the poet i c and the revolu tionary
)J
spiri t is part of a larger contrad iction, that of the linear time o f

the modern age a s opposed t o the rhythmic time o f the poem.
History and the image : J oyce's work can be seen as a m o ment in
the history of modern literature , and in this sense it is history ;
but the truth i s that its au thor conceived it a s a n image-pre
cisely as the image of the dissolution of the chronological time
1 09
of history in the rhythmic time of the poem . Abolition of

yesterday, today , and tomorrow in the conj oinings and couplings
of languag Modern l i terature is an impassione rej ection of

the modern age . This rejection is no less violent among the
poets of Anglo-American "mod ernism " than among the mem

bers of the European and Latin American avan t-gardes. A l though
the former were reactioz:1aries and the l atter revolutionaries,
both were an ti-capi talist. Their different attitudes originated in
a comm on aversion to the world of the bourge oisi e . Some times
the rejection was total , as in the case of Henri M i chaux (distiller
of the poison/an tidote against our time-against time). Like
their Romantic and S ymbolist prede cessors , twen tie th-century
poets have set against the linear time of progress and o f history
the instantaneous time of eroti cism or the cyclical time of
analogy or the hollow t ime of the ironic consciousness.- I mage
and humor : rej e ctions of the chronological time of cri tical
reason with i ts deifica tion of the fu ture . The rebellion s and
misfortunes of the Roman tic poets and ' their nineteen th-century
,/''
descendants are repeated in our time . We have lived alongside

the Russian Revolu tion, the bureaucratic d ictatorships of
Commu nism , H itler, and the Pax A mericana , j ust as th e Roman
tics were con temporary w i th the French Revolution , N apoleon,
the 1--! o ly Alliance , and the horrors of the first ind ustrial revolu
tion The history of poe try in the twentieth cen tury is, as i t
was in the nineteenth , a history of subversions, conversions,
abj urations, heresies, aberrations. These words find their
cou nterparts in other word s : pe rsecuJion, exile , insane asylum,

sujcide , prison, humiliation, solitude . .
' The du ality of magic and politics is only one of the opposi-
1 10
tions with wh ich modern poetry is laden . Love and h u m o r

are anothe AII M arcel Ducham p 's work revolves o n the axis
of erotic affirma tion and iron ic negation. The resul t is meta
irony , a sort of animated suspension .
region beyond affirma
tion and nega tion. The nude in the Philadelphia Muse u m , with
her legs open , clu tching a gas lamp i n one hand (like a fallen
Statue of Liberty) , leaning back on bunches of twigs as if they
were the logs of a funeral pyre , against the background of a
wa terfall (double image of mythic water and indu strial electri
city ) - this is Artemis the pin-up seen through the chin k of a
door by A c teon the voyeur. Me ta-irony works in circular
fashion : the act of seeing a work of art is turned i n to a n act of

voyeurism . Looking at some thing is not a neu tral expe rience ;
i t is a con fession of complicity. Our glance sets the object on
fire , and if we gaze , we ogle . D uchamp sh ows the creative
power of our l ook , and at the sam e time its derisory side. To
look is to transgress, but transgression is a crea tive gam e .
When we peep through a chink i n the d oor of aesthetic an
m oral censure , we gl impse the ambiguous relation between
artistic con temptation and eroticism , between seeing and
desiri ng. We see the image of our desire and i ts petri fication in
a.;" object-a naked doll . In the Large Glass Duchamp had p

se'it ted the eternal feminine as a combustion engine and the
myth of the great goddess and her circle of victim-worshipers as

an electri c circu i t : the art of the Western world and its erotic
rel igious images, from the Virgin Mary to Melusi na, dealt
wi th in the impersonal m anner of th ose industrial prospectuses
which sh ow us how an apparatus works . The Philadelphia
assemblage reproduces the same themes, but from the opposite
111
perspective : not the transforma tion of Nature (girl , waterfall)

into an industrial apparatus, bu t the transmutation of gas and
water into an erotic image and a land scape. I t is the reverse, the
mirror image of Th e Bride Stripped Bare by her Bach elorsby her p eeping-Toms . The othe r : the same.
I rony belittles the object ; meta-irony is interested not in the
value of objects bu t in how they work. And the way they work
is symbolic : amor/umor/hamor . . . Me ta-irony shows how
mu tually dependent are the things we call "superior" and
"inferior," and forces us t o withhold j udgment. I t is not an
inversion of values but a moral a nd aesthetic liberati on which
brings opposi tes into communication. Duchamp closes the
period which Romantic irony opened , and in this his w ork is
analogous to that of J ames J oy ce , that other p oet of comic
erotic cosmogonies. Duchamp : critic of the subject wh o looks
and of the object looked a t ; Joyce : cri tic of language and of
that which speaks through language, man 's myths and rituals.
In both criticism becomes creation , as Mallarme wanted ; an act
of creation which consists of the "renversemen t " of the modern
era by means of i ts own weapons : criticism and iron
t) l ndustry ,
tha t m ost modern of all mod ernities, is also the most a ncient,
the other side of the myth of eroticism . I t is the end of recti
linear time , or, more precisely, the presentation of linear time

as one of time's m anifestations. The two most ex trem e and
"modern" works of the modern tradi tion also mark its limit ,
its end . With and in them the modern age , in i t s momen t
of ful fillment, closes.
Love/humor and magic/politics are variants of the cen tral
"
opposition : art/life . From Navalis to the Surrealists, m odern
I I2
poe ts have confronted this opposition and failed to resolve or

dissolve i t . Duality assumes other forms : antagon ism between
the absolu te and the relative , or between the word and history .
Disillusioned wi th history, Gongora changes poetry because
he cannot change life ; Rimbaud wants to ch ange poetry in order
'
to change life . I t is almost always forgotten that Soledades ,

the poem which marks the consummation of Gongora 's
aesthetic revolution, con tains a di atribe against commerce ,
industry , and especi ally the discovery and conquest of America,
Spain's great historical feat. On the contrary , Rim baud's poetry
tends to spill over into action . The alch emy of th e word is a
poetic method of changing human nature ; the poetic word
antedates the historical event because it produces or, as he says,
"multiplies the fu ture . " Not only does poetry provoke new
psychological states (as do religions and drugs) and libera te
nations (as do revolu tions) , it also has as its mission th e inven
tion of a new eroticism and the transformation of passional
.;/"
rel ationships between men and women,{Rim baud proclaims the
'
need to "reinvent lov e , " an endeavor w hich reminds us of
Fourier. Poetry is the bridge between u topian though t and
reality , the mome n t when the idea becomes incarna te . Poe try is
the true revolut ion that will end the discord between history
and idea . But Rimbaud l,e ft a strange testamen t : A Season in
0.
Hell. A fterward : silenc
A t the o ther extreme, b u t inten t upon the same adve nture
and as yet one more example o f the common endeavor,

Mallarm e l ooks for that convergen t moment of all moments
in which a pure act-the poem -can unfold itself. That act,
those "d ice thrown in eternal circumstances" is a contradictory
1 13
reality because , though an action, i t is also a poem , a non-act.

And the place where the act-poem unfolds is a non-place :
eternal circumstances, that i s to say , non-circumstances. Relative
and absolu te merge withou t disappeari ng. The mome n t of the
poem is the dissolu tion of all m oments ; and ye t , the eternal
mome n t of the poem is th is moment : a unique , u nrepeatable,
historic time .. The poem is not a pure act, it is a contingency ,
a violation of the absolute . The reappearance of contingency is,
in its turn, only one moment in the spinning of the dice, now
blended with the rotation of the worlds. The absolu te absorbs
chance, the u niqueness of this m oment is dissolved in an
infinite "total count in formation . " As a violation of the uni
verse the poem is also the double of th u niverse ; as the double
of the u niverse, the poem is the excep tion .
The art/life opposition, in any of i ts m anifestations, is un
resolvable. The only solu tion i s the heroic-burlesque re medy
of Duchamp and J oyce. Such a solu tion is a non-solu ti on :
l iterature becomes the exal tation of l anguage to the point of
annihilation ; painting is criticism of the painted object and
of the eye which looks at it. Meta-irQ_ny frees objects from their
burden of time and signs from their meanings ; it sets opposites
in circulation ; it is a universal animation in which everythin
turns ac into its contrary. o t nihilism bu t d isorien tation :
the side facing us is the side away from us. The game of oppo
sites dissolves, without resolving, the opposi tion between
seeing and desiring, eroticism and ontemplation , art a nd life.
Basicall y , this i s M allarme's reply :( the moment of the poem is
1
the intersection between absolu te and relative, an instantaneous
reply which undoes itself ceaselessly . :The opposition is always
1 14
reappearing, now as the nega tion of the absolu te by con tingency ,

now as the dissolu tion of conti ngency in an absolu te which , in
turn, fades away . By the very l ogic of meta-irony , the non
solution which is a solution, is n o t a solution .
The Pattern R eversed

The avant-garde breaks with the immediate tradition
Symbolism and Naturalism in literature , I mpressionism i n
painting - and this breach is a con tinuation of the trad i tion
begun by Romanticism . A trad i ti on in which Symbolism,
Naturalism , and I mpressionism had also been moments of break
ing and of continuing. But something distinguishes the avan t
garde movements from the earlier ones : the violence of the
attitudes and the program s, the radical ism of the work s. The
avan t-garde is an exasperation and an exaggeration of the trends
which pre ceded i t ./Violence and e xtremism soon bring the
'
artist face to face wi th the limi ts of his art or talent : Pi casso
and Braqu e explore and exhaust the possibilities of Cubism in a
few years ; in ano ther few years Pound is on his way back from
"Imagism " ; Chirico moves from "me taphysical painting" to the
academic cliche with the same speed that Garcia Lorca goes
from traditional poetry to neo-baroque Gongorism , and from
this to Surrealism . Though the avan t-garde opens new paths,
artists and poets move along them so rapidly that in n e x t to no
time they reach the end and bump into a wal l . The only remedy
is a new transgression : m ake a hole in the wall , jump over the
abyss. Each t ransgression is followed by a new obstacle , each
1 15
obstacle by another j ump . Always caught be tween extre mes,

the avan t-garde intensifies the aesthetic of change initi ated by
Romanticism . A cceleration and multiplication : aesthe tic
changes cease to coincide wi th the movement of the genera tions,
and occur withi n the life of the individual artist. Picasso is a
good example : the dizzying and contradictory su ccession of
breaks and discoveries which is his work confirms rather than
denies the general d irection of the age . While it is not certain
that the twen ti e th century is ri cher in poetry and art works than
was the nineteenth , it has undeniably been more varied and
haphazard . But the acceleration of change and the pro l i feration
of schools and trends has brought abou t two unexpected con
sequences: one undermines the very tradi tion of the change and
the break, the o ther the idea of the "work of art . " I w i l l deal
with both later.
I n tensity and bread th . The accelerated pace of change is
accom panied by the widening of literary space . Starting with the
second half of the nineteenth century several great l i te ratures
begin to appear ou tside the strictly European sphere . The North
American first, then the Slavic , especially Russian , and now
those of Latin A meri ca , the Spanish-speaking nations and
Brazil . In the philosophical and warlike Ameri can I ndian,
Chateaubriand d iscovers the o th er ; in Edgar Allan Poe ,
Baudelaire d iscovers his mirror image . Poe is the first l iterary
myth of the Europeans, by which I mean that he is the first
American wri ter _Gonverted into a myth . But it is not really an

American myth ; _For Baudelaire , who invented i t , Joed is a
European poet gone astray in the democratic industrial bar
barism of the United States. More than an invention, Poe is
1 16
Baudelaire 's translation . While he tra nslates his stories, he

translates himself: Poe is Baudelaire and Yankee democracy is
the mod ern world , a world in which "progress is measu red not
by the u se of gas lamps in the streets but by the disappearance
of traces of original sin . " (This odd opinion denies i n advan ce
Max Weber's idea : Capitalism is n o t the product of the Pro
testan t ethic bu t anti-Christianity , an a ttempt to wipe out the
original stai n . ) B audelaire's vision will be that of Mallarme
and his d escendan ts: Poe is the m y th of the brpther lost not in a
strange and hostile land but in modern history For all these
poets the United States is not a coun try ; it is the modern age.
The second myth was Walt Whitman, a differen t mirage .
The Poe cult was one of similarities ; the passion for Whitman
was a double discovery : he was the poet of another continent
and his poe try was another con tinen t. Whitman glorifies
democracy , progress, and the fu ture . Ju dging from appearan ces,
his poetry belongs to a tradition con trary to that of m od ern
poetry : then how could he become such a powerful i n fluence in
world poe try? Some of Victor Hugo's poems contain a noctur
nal , visionary element which at times redeems it of i ts eloquence
and its facile optimism . And Whitman 's? He has been called
the poet of space-poet of space in movement , one should add .
Spaces which are nomadic, an immi nent future : U topia and
Americanism . But also, and primordial ly , langu age , th e physical
reality of words, images, rhy thms . Whitman 's language is a
bod y , an all-p owerfu l manifold presence. Without i t his poe try
would rem ain oratory , sermonizing , newspaper editorial,
proclamation . Poetry filled with ideas and pseudo-ideas, com
monplaces and au thentic revel ations, an enormous fro thy
1 17
mass which suddenly is incarn a te in a body language th at we

can see , smel l , tou ch , and , above all, hear. The fu ture d isappears ;
the present , the presence of the body, remains. Whitm an's
influence has been vast and has worked in all directions and
upon opposed temperaments , Claudel at one extrem e and, a t
the other, Garcia Lorca. His shadow covers the Europ e an
con tinent from Pessoa's Lisbon to the Moscow of the Ru ssian
Fu turists. Whi tman is the grand father of the European and
Latin American avant-garde . He m akes an early appearance
among us : Jose M arti presen ted him to the Spanish American
public in an article wri t ten in 1 88 7 . Ruben Daria was imme
diately tempted to emulate him -a fatal temptation. S ince
then he has continued to excite many of ou r p oets: emu lation ,
admiration, enthusiasm , empty clatter.
The first manifestations of the avant-garde were cosm opolitan
and p olyglot. M arinetti wri tes h is manifestos in French and
polem icizes with the Russian Cu ba-Fu turists in Moscow and
St. Petersburg ; Khlebnikov and his friend s invent zaum , the
transrational language ; D u champ exhibits in New York and
plays chess in Buenos A ires ; Pi cabia works-and shocks-in New
York , Barcelona, and Paris; Arthur Cravan refu ses to d uel with
Ap ollinaire in Paris, but b oxes in Madrid with black champion
Jack Johnson , e nters Mexico d uring the Revolution , and sails
off on a barge , disappearing, l ik e Quetzalcoatl, in the Gulf o f
Mexico ; Cendrars' early poems report o n Christmas in New
York and an interminable journey on t he Trans-Siberi a n ; Diego
Rivera meets Ilya Ehrenburg in Mon tparnasse and reappears a
few y ears later in the pages of Julio Juren ito ; Vicente Huidobro
arrives in Paris fro m Chile , collaborates with the poets who were
1 18
then call ing themselves Cubi sts , and wi th Pierre Reverdy fo unds
Nord-Sud. The Dada explosion compounds the babe l : Arp is

French-Alsatian ; Ball and Huelsenbeck , German ; Tzara ,
Romanian ; and Picabia, French-Cuban. Bilingualism prevails
Arp writes in German and in French, U ngare tti in I talian
and French , Huidobro in Spanish and Fre nch . Their pred ile c
tion for French reveals the central role played in the evol ution
of modern poetry by the French avant-gard e . I mention this
we1 l-known fact because some North American and Engli sh
cri tics tend to ignore i t . And eve n poets d o . In a 1 96 1
interview Pound made this ex travagant affirma tion : " I f Paris
had been as interesting as I taly in 1 9 2 4 , I would h ave stayed
in Paris. "
The avan t-garde movement in English began a little l ater than
on the continent and in Latin America . The first book s of
Pound and Eliot were impregnated with Lafargue , Corbiere ,
and even Gau tier. While the English language poets lingered in
Imagism , a timid reaction to Symbolism , Apollinaire was
publishing A /cools , and M ax J acob was transforming the prose
poem . The great crea tive period o f the Angl o-A merican avant
garde starts with the defini tive version of the first Can tos
( 1 924 ) , Th e Waste Land ( 1 9 2 2 ) , and a littl e , magne tic , not very
well known book by William Carlos Williams, Kora in He ll:
bnpro J'isations ( 1 9 20). All t his coincides with the beginning o f

the second stage of the European avan t-garde : Surrealism .
Two opposite versions o f the mod ern moveme n t , one red and
the other white .
M y purpose has been t o show, first, the cosmopolitan nature
of the avant-gard e , and , second , that the poe try written i n
I 19
English is part of a general trend . The d ates indicate how un

likely are affirmations that E liot and Pound knew only the
Symb olist tradition a nd skimmed over Apollinaire , Reverdy ,
Dada, and Surrealism . Harry Levin has pointed out to m e the
influence of Apollinaire on e . e . cummings (who was, m oreover,
the friend and translator of Aragon) ; the relation be tw een Kora
in Hell and L es champs magnetiques , the prose-poem of Andre
Bre ton and Philippe Soupau l t is dire ct ; Wallace Steven s had
an admirable acquaintance with contemporary French poetry
but we would like to know more about those years when the
great change was coming abo u t . The Paris of Pound and Eliot
was the cosmopolitan Paris of the first th ird of the cen tury,
scene of many an artistic and l iterary revolu tion . The story of
Lafargue 's influence on Eliot h as been repeated to sati e ty ; on
the other h and no one has explored the simi lari ties between the
poetic collage of Pou nd and Eliot and the "simultaneiste"
structure of Zone, L e m usicien de Sain t-Merry , and other
Apollinaire poems. I am not trying to deny the originality o f
the Anglo-American poets, b u t merely t o indicate that the
movement of poetry in English can be fu lly understood only
within the contex t of Western poe try . The same applies to other
trends : without Dada, born in Zurich and translated i n to French
by Tzara, Surrealism would be inexplicable. Without D ada, and
wi thout German R omanticism likewise . In their turn , the
Spanish and Argen tinian ultraismos cannot be explain ed without
Huidobro , who is inexplicable w ithout Reverdy .
I have given these examples not to propose a linear idea of
literary history but rather to emphasize its complexity and its
transnational character. A literature is a language exist ing
1 20
not in isolation bu t in constant relation with o ther languages,

other literatures. E liot finds that the union of contrad ictory or
disparate experiences is characteristic of the English "meta
physical " poets. A characteristic is not an exclusive tra i t : the
union of opposites-parad ox and metaphor-appears in all
European poetry of tha t era . The consequent dissociation of
sensibility and imagination-Neoclassic wit and roman tic
Miltonian eloquence-is also a general European phenomenon.
For this reason Eliot can say that "Jules Lafargue, and Tristan
Corbiere in m any of his poems, are nearer to the 'school of
Donne' than any modern English poet . " He might hav e $aid the
same of Lopez Velard e , had he been able to read him .
tW estern
literature is an interweaving of relationships, a fab ric made up
of the pat terns traced by_ he weaving in and out of movements,
personali ties-and chance .Twentieth-century trends of p oetry
repeat patterns del ineated by Romanti cism b u t , as I shall try to

show, in reverse . It is the same pattern -inverte dlr he relation
of opposition between Germanic and Romance guages

reappears in the twen tieth century and tend s to become crystal
lized at two extremes : poetry in E nglish , and French p oetry .
I will refer t o p oe try in Spanish , n o t only because i t i s my own
tradition but because the modern period , in Spain as in America,
is one of the richest in our history . I realize that I am over
looking important movements and great figures : I talia n and
Russian Futurism , German Expressionism , Rilke , Ben n , Pessoa ,
Montal e , U ngaretti , the Greeks, the Brazilians, the Poles . . .
The outlook of a German or Italian poet would u ndou btedly
be differen t . My point of view is a b iased one, that of a Spanish
American.
121
The Cl osing of the Circle
Romanticism was not only a reaction against the Neoclassical

aesthetic but against the Greco-La tin tradition , as form ulated
by the Renaissance and the Baroque . Neoclassicism , after all,
was only the last and most rad i cal manifestation of tha t tradi
tion. The return to national poetic tradi ti ons (or the invention
of these traditions) was a rej e ct ion of the central tradi tion of
the Western worl d . It was not fortui tous that the first expres
sions of Romanticism , together with the Gothic n ovel and
medievalism , were Wathek's orien talism and the American
vastness of Natchez. Ca thedrals and Gothic abbeys, mezquitas,
Hindu temples, deserts, American forests : signs of den ial
rather than images. Real or imaginary , each ed ifice and landscape
was a polemical proposi tion against the tyranny of Rome and
its heritage . I n his essays of poe tic criticism , Blanco White
spends little time on the influence of French N eoclassicism
because he goes straight to the heart of the matter : the source
of the evil which afflicts Spanish poe try lies in the six teenth
cen tury ; its name is the I talian Renaissance. Eloquence , regu
lari ty , Petrarchism : symmetry which d istorts, geometry which
strangles Spanish p oetry and prevents i t from being itself.
To recover their own being, Spanish poets must free themselves
from that heritage and return to their real trad ition . Blanco
Whi te d oes not say what that trad ition is, except that i t is
otlz er. A different tradition from that worshiped in eq ual mea

sure by Garcilaso , Gongora , and the Neoclassical poets. The
main tradi tion of Europe is turned into an aberration, a strange
imposi tion. I t had been the uni fying elemen t - the bridge
between languages, spiri ts, and nations : now it is alien . Roman
ticism obeys the same centrifugal impu lse as does Protestantism .
I f it is not a schism , it i s a separation , a breach .
1 22
The breaking of the main Western tradition caused m any

tradi tions to appear; this plurali ty of tradi tions led to the
accep tance of different ideas of beau ty ; aesthetic relativism
became the j ustification of the aesthetic of change-the cri tical
tradition which affirms itself in its very self-denial. Within this
tradi tion , Anglo-American poetic modernism is a great change , a
great rej ection , and a great nove l ty . The breach consists in tha t,
far from being a rejection of the main tradi tion , i t is a search
for i t . Not a revol t , but a restoration. A change of dire ction :
reu nion , not separation . A l though Eliot and Pound held differ
ent ideas about what this tradition really was, their sta rting
point was the same : consciousness of the schism , the feeling
and the knowledge of being cut off. A double schism, both
personal and historical . They wen t to Europe not as expatriates,
bu t i n search of their origins ; their journey was not one of
exile but a return to the source . It was a movement in the
opposite directi on from Whitma n ' s : not the exploration of
unknown spaces, the American beyond , but the return to
England . However, E ngland , sep arated from Europe si nce the
Reformation , was only one link in the broken chai n . E liot's
Anglicism was a European trai t ; Pound , more of an ex tremist,
j umped from England to France and from F rance to I taly.
The word "center" appears freq uently in the wri tings of both
these poets, generally in association wi th the word "order. "
Tradi tion becomes identified with the idea of a center of
universal convergence, an earthly and a heavenly order. Poe try
is the search for , and sometimes the vision of, thi s ord e r. For
Eliot the historical image of spiritual order is medieval Chri stian
society . The idea of the modern world as the disintegration of
Christian order in the Middle Ages appears in many wri ters
1 23
of th is period , but in Eliot it is more than an idea, i t is a destiny

and a vision . Something though t and lived -some thing spoken :
a language l f the modern era i s for Eliot the breaking up of
y
Christian order, his i nd ividu al fate as poet and modern man has
.\.
its place precisely in this historical con tex t . In its turn , history
turns toward the spiritual sphere . Modern history is fall, separa
tion, d isintegration ; it is likewise the way of purga tion and
reconciliation. Exile is not exile : it is the re turn to timeless
time. Christianity tak es time upon i tsel f only to transm ute it.
Eliot's p oetics become transformed into a religious vision
))
of modern Western histor
I n Pound 's case the idea of tradition is more confused and

changeable. Confused , because it is not so much an idea as a
jux taposition of image s ; changeable, because , like the Griffin
Dante saw in Pu rgatory , it changes endlessly while remaining
always the same . There lies p erhaps his profound American ism :
his search for the cen tral trad i tion is only one more fo rm, the
ex treme , of the tradition of search and ex plora tion. H i s invol
u ntary resembl ance to Whitman is surprising . Both of them
go beyond the bounds of the Occiden t , but one searches for a
mystical-pantheistic effusion (I ndia), the other for a wisdom
which will bring th e heavenly order into harmony with that of
the earth (China). Pound 's fascination with Confucius' system is
like that of the eigh teen th-century J esui ts and , like the irs, is
a political passion. The Jesui ts thought a Christian China would
be a world model ; Pound dreamed of a Confucianized United
States.
The ex traordinary richness and comp lex ity of the re ferences ,
allusions, and echoes of other epochs and civil izations make
1 24
the Can tos a cosmop olitan tex t , a true poetic babel (and there is
nothing pejorative in this designation) . Nevertheless, the
Can tos are primarily a North American poem written for North
Ameri cans-which obviously does not prevent them from fasci
nating everyone . The various episodes, figures, and tex ts present
in the poem are models which the poet proposes to his com
patriots. All are aimed toward a u niversal or, to more exact,
imperial , standard . In this Pound d iffers from Whitman . One
sings of a national society , broad as a w orld , which would
finally bri ng abou t democracy ; the o ther of a u niversal nation ,
heir to all civilizations and all empires . Pound talks about the
world but-thinks always about his country , a world-wide
country ._ The nationalism of Whitmn was a universalism ; the
universal {sm of Pound a nationalism ._This is the reason for
the Pound cult of the political a nd moral system of Confu cian
ism : he saw in the Chinese Empire a model for the United
States . From this too his admiration for M ussolini. Th e ghost
of Justinian of the final Can tos corresp onds also to this imperial
VISIOn .
The center of the world is not the place where the re ligious
word is manifest , as in Eliot ; it is the source of nergy that
moves men and j oins them in a COmmon cause r()U !l d 's order is
hierarchical although his hierarchies are not based on money .

His passion was neither
erty nor equality bu t grandeur and
justice among u nequals iJJ i s nostalgia for the agrarian society

was not nostalgia for the democratic village bu t for the old
imperial societies such as Chi na and Byzantium , two great
bureaucratic empires. His mistake consisted not in his vision of

those civilizations bu t , rather , in not recognizi ng the enormous
1 25
weight of the state , crushing the peasants, artisans, and mer

chants. His anticapitalism , as can be seen in the famous Can to
against Usu ry , expresses a legitim ate horror toward the modern
world , but his condemnation of money-grubbing is that of
the medieval Catholic Church . Pound did not recognize that
capitalism is not usury, i t is not the hoarding of excrem ental
gol d , but rather its su blimation and transformation through
human effort i nto social products. The usurer's hoard i ng stems
wealth, retires it from circulati o n , while the products o f
capitalism are i n turn productive : they circulate and m ultiply.
Pound ignored Adam Smith , Ricar_9 o , and Marx -the A BC
of the e conomy and of our world :
Pound 's excremental obsession iS' associated wi th his hatred
of usury and with antisemitism ; the other face of that obsession
is his solar cul t . Excrement is dem oniac and terrestrial ; its
image , gold , is hidden in the bowels of the earth and in the
coffers, symbolic bowels, of the u surer . But there is an other
image of excrement which is its transfiguration : the sun .
The excremental gold o f the usurer i s hidden i n the depths; the
sun lights the heights for all . Two an tithetical moveme nts:
excrement re turns to the earth ; the sun extends above i t .
Pound admirably perceived the opposition between these two
images but he did not see the connection , the contradictory
relation uniting them. I n all imperial emblems and visions the
sun or i ts homolog - the solar bird , the eagle-occupies the
central position. The emperor is the su n . In the celesti al order
the rotation of the planets and the seasons round a luminous
axis-this is the way to govern the earth . Order, rhythm , dance :
social harmony, justice from those on high , loyalty fro m those
1 26
below . Pound 's dream is, like that of Fourier though in an

opposite sense , an analogy of the solar syste m .
For E l i o t poe try i s the vision o f divine order seen from here ,
from a world cast adri ft from history ; for Pound it is the
instantaneous percep tion of the fu sion of the natural (divine)
order with the human order. Instants become archetyp al : the
hero's feats, the lawgiver's cod e , the emperor's scales , the
artist's creation , and, above all, the apparition of the goddess,
"wi th the veil of faint cloud before her I KvOnpa 5 elvd as a leaf
borne in the curre n t . " History is hell , purgatory , heave n,
limbo-and poetry is the tale, the story of man 's j ou rn ey
through these worlds of history . Not only the story , also the
obj ective p resen tation of moments of order and disord er.
Poetry is paideia . Those instantaneous visions that ren d the
shadows of history as D iana the clouds, are not ideas or things
they are ligh t . "All things that are are ligh ts . " But Pound is
not a contemplative ; these lights are acts and they suggest
a course of action .
The search for the cen tral tradition was a reconnoite ring
expedition , in the military sense of the expression : a p olemic
and a discovery . A polemic because it saw the history of
English p oetry as a gradual separation fron1 the cen tral tradi
tion. Chaucer, says Pou nd in the A BC of R eading , participates
in the intelle_c tual life of the continent and is a Europe an, b u t
Shakespeare "is already looking back t o Europe from the
outside . " A discovery in that it finds those works which actually
belong to the central tradi tion and shows the bonds which
unite them . European poe try is an animated and coheren t
whol e . Pound wonders : "Can anyone estima te Donne's best
I 27
poems save in relation with Cavalcanti? " Eliot in turn uncovers

affinities between the "metaphysical" poets and some French
Symbolists, and between both of these and the Floren tine
poets of the thirteen th cen tury . This reconstru ction of a
tradition ex tending from the Provenc;al poets to Baudelaire was
an assembly not of ghosts but of living works. In the center is
Dante , the standard , the touchstone . Eliot read s Baudelaire
from Dante's perspective , and L es jleurs du mal turns into a
modern commentary on the Inferno and the Purgatorio .
Wedged between the Odyssey and the Divine Comedy , Pound
wri tes an epic poem which is also a hel l , a purgatory , a nd a
paradise . The Divine Com edy i s an allegorical rather th an an
epi c p oem ; the poe t's journey through the three world s is an
allegory of the Book of Exodus , in turn an allegory of the
history of the human race from the Fall to the Last Judgment,
which is only an allegory of the wanderings of the human soul ,
redeemed at las t by divine love . I ts theme is the return of the
soul to God ; the theme of the Can tos is also a return , b u t to
where? In the course of the j ourney the poet has forgotten his
destination . The matter of the Can tos is epic ; the tripartite
division is theological. Secularized theology : authoritarian
politics. Pound's fascism , before being a m oral error, w a s a

li terary error, a confusion of genres.
The bringing together of the fragmen ts was not an an tiquarian
labor, but a rite of expiation and reconciliation : the purging of
the sins of Protestantism and R omanticism . The results were
contradictory . I n his exped ition to reconquer the central
tradi tion, Pound went beyond Rome -to China six cen turies
before Christ-while Eliot stayed at the halfway point , the
1 28
Anglican Church . Pound d iscovered not one but many tradi tions
and embraced them all ; along with plurality he chose j u x ta
position and syncretism . E liot ch ose only one tradition, b u t his
vision was no less eccen tric . Eccentrici ty was not a mistake on
the part of these two poe t s ; it was embodied in the very origin
of the m ovement and in i ts contradictory nature . Anglo
American "modernism " conceived of i tself as a "classical
revival . " It is with precisely this ex pression that T .E . H ulme
opened his essay " Romanticism and Classicism . " The y oung
English p oet and critic had found an aesthetic and a p olitical
credo in the ideas of Charles Maurras and hi s moveme n t
L 'A ction Franr;aise . H u lme pointed out the connection between

Romanti cism and revol u tion : "it was R omanticism tha t made
the Revolu tion . " This is oversimplification : the initial affinity
between Romanticism and revolution resolved i tself, as we
have see n , in oppositi on . Romanticism was an an ti-rationalism ;
the revoluti onary Terror scandalized the R oman tics precisely
because of its systematic nature and its rational pre t en sions.
In his reply t o Madame de Stael , "On Germ any , " Hein e p oi nted
ou t that Robesp ierre had cut off the heads of the nobility
with the same l ogic with which K ant had decapitated the ideas
of the old me taphysics. Al though Hulme criticized the aesthetic
ideas of the German Roman tics, h is attitude and that of his
circle recalled the spirit of the Romantics. In both, hatred of the
revolu tion became nostalgia for the medieval Christian world.
This is an idea which appears in all the Germ an Romantics and
which N avalis formulated in his essay "Europe and Ch ristianity . "
The new Christian society , born o u t o f the ruins o f rationalistic,
revolu tionary Europe , would finally realize the union fore-
1 29
shadowed by the Holy Roman Empire . The Cl assicism of

Hulme , Eliot, and Pound was a Roman ticism which did not
recognize itself as such .
Maurras' movement claimed to be the heir of the Greco
Roman and medieval trad ition : Classicism , rationalism , mon
archism , Ca tholicism . I t is scarcely worth no ting that this
tradition is dualistic and con tradictory from i ts origins :
Heracli tus/Parmenides, monarchy /democracy . Moreover, the
Reformation, Roman ticism , and the Revolution now h ave
become the cen tral stream , and that which Eliot and h is friends
wished to restore h as become marginal . In the history of
modern France , Maurras' movement was that of a poli tical
faction. Not only was it marginal historically speaking , i t was
also heretical in a religious sense : Rome condemned i t . Maurras'
rationalism did not excl ude the cu lt of authori ty nor the
suppression of cri tici sm by violence and antisemi tism . His
poetical classicism was an archaism . In his poli tical ideas the
cardinal concept was that of the nation : a Romantic i d e a .
In search of the central trad i tion, Eliot pursued a se ct which
was schismatic in religion and marginal in aesthetics. Who
reads Maurras' poems today? Fortuna tely , the anti-Romanticism
of Hulme, Eliot, and Pound was less strict than that of Maurras.
Less strict and less coherent. They invented a poetic tradi tion
featuring the very names the Romantics had claimed as their
own . The most notable were Dante and Shakespeare . B o th had
been used as weapons against the Neoclassical aesthetic and
the hegemony of Racine. The inclusion of the "metaphysical"
poets-the English expression of European B aroque poe try
and "conceptismo" -did not fal l into line with what is generally
1 30
understood by Classicism . Hulme graciously ju stified these

violations of Classicist orthodoxy : "that Racine is on the
ex treme classical side , I agree . . . bu t Shakespeare is the classic
of motion . " Clever but not convincing .
While Anglo-American "modernism " was finding inspiration
in Maurras, the young French poe ts were discovering Lau trea
mont and Sade. There could be no greater difference . European
avant-garde movemen ts were tinged wi th a strong Romantic
coloration, from the most timid , like German Expressionism , to
the most exalted, like the Futurisms of I taly and Ru ssia. Dada
and Surrealism were ultra-Romantic, though it is almost
redundant to say so. The extreme formalism of some of these
trends-Cubism, constructivism ,,abstractionism -seems to
belie my claim. But it does n o t( the formalism of mod ern art

is a rejection of the naturalism and h umanism of the G reco
Roman tradition . I ts historical origins are ou tside the Classical
tradi tion of the West : black art, pre-Colombian art, the art
of Oceania. Formal ism con tinues and accentuates the trend
begun by Romanticism : to oppose other tradi tions to the
Greco-Roman tradition . M odern formalism destroys the idea
of represen tation -in the sense of Greco-Roman and Renaissance
illusionism -and submits the human figure to the stylization of
a rational or passional geome try -when it does not expel it
from the picture al together It is said th at Cubism was a reaction
against the Romanticism of the I mpressionists and Fau ves.
This is tru e , but Cubism is only in telligible within the contra
dictory context of the avant-garde , in the arne way tha t I ngres
is only isible when faced with Delacroix,: In the history of
the avan t-garde , Cubism is the moment of reason not o f Classi-
131
cism . A delirious reason , suspended over the abyss, between

the Fauves and the Surrealists. As for the geometries of K andin
sky and M ondrian : they are impregnated with occultism and
hermeti cism , so that they prolong the deepest and most per
sistent c urrent of the Rom an tic trad ition . The European avant
gard e , even in its most rigorous and rational manifesta tions
Cubism and abstractionism -continued and exacerbated the
Romantic tradition . Its Roman ticism was contradictory, a
critical passion whi ch ceaselessly denies i tself in order to regen
erate itself.
Oppositions repeat , though conversely , those of the Romantic
period : Pound condem ns Gongora exactly when the y ou ng
Spanish poets proclaim him their master ; for B re ton the Celtic
myths a nd the Grail legend bear wi tness to the o ther trad ition
the tradition which d enies Rome and which was never com
pletely Christian-while for Eliot these same myths acquire
spiritual meaning only when they come into contact w i th
Roman Christianity ; Pound sees in Provenal poetry a Poetics
and the beginning of our tradition, the Surreal ists see in it a
subversive erotic tradition-subversive in the face of bourgeois
morality be cause of i t s exaltation of adultery , and subversive
in the face of modern promiscuity for its celebration o f exclu
sive love ; the European avan t-garde ex alts the aesthetic o f
the excep tion , Eliot wants t o rein tegrate the religious ex cep
tion - the Protestant separation -into the Christian ord er of
R ome, and Pound tries to insert within a universal ord er the
historical peculiarity which is the United State s ; Dada and
the Surrealists destroy the codes of law , and heap sarc asm and
spittle u pon altars and institutions, Eliot believes in the Church
1 32
and the M onarchy , Pou nd proposes for the United States the
image of Leader-Philosopl)er-Savior, a mixture of Confucius,
/
Malatesta, and M ussolini,; for the European avan t-garde the ideal
society is outside histor ,-it is the w orld of the primi t ives or

the ci ty of the fu ture , the dateless past or the comm unistic apd
libertarian utopia-while the arche types Eliot .and Pound offe
e empires and c urches, histori cal models ; bada denies the
;arks of the past and those of the presen t as wel l , and
the
Anglo-American poets insist upon the reconstruction of a

tradi tion ; for Surrealism the poet writes that which his u ncon
scious dictates to him , poetry is the transcription of the o th er
Foice which speaks in each o f us when we quiet the voice of

wakefulness, while for the Anglo-Americans poetry is technique,
control, m astery , consciousness, lucidi ty ; Bre ton was a friend
of Trotsky and Eliot a monarchis t . The list of oppositions
is endless. Even in poli tical and m oral "errors" the sym m etry
of opposition reappears : Pound 's Fascism is balanced by th
S talinism of Aragon and Neruda.
The Surrealists believe in the iubversive power of desire and
in the revolu tionary function of eroticism . The Spaniard
Cernuda sees in pleasure not only a physical explosion b u t a
moral and political criticism of Christian and bourgeoi s
society :
Abajo estatuas anonimas,
Precep tos de niebla :
Una chispa de aquellos placeres
B rilla en Ia hora vengativa.
Su fulgor puede destruir vuestro mundo .
1 33
(Down w i th anonymous statues, I Rules of fog : I A sp ark of

those forbidden pleasures I Glitters in the vengeful hour. I I ts
flash can destroy your world . ) The different evaluations o f
dream s and visions are n o less stri king than those o f eroticism .
Eliot remarked that Dan te "lived in an age in which men still
saw visions . . . We have nothing but dreams and we have
forgotten that seeing visions was once a more significa n t,
interesting and disciplined kind of dreaming. We take for
granted that our dreams spring from
elow :
possibly the qual i ty
of our d reams suffers in conseq uence. Y The Surrealists exal ted

I
dreams and visions but refused to distinguish between them :

both spring from below , both are revelations of the abyss-the
"other side" of men and reality .
. All these oppositions can be absorbed in one : the Eu ropean
av mt-garde breaks with all traditions and thus continues the
Romantic tradi tion; the A nglo-American movement breaks
with the Romantic trad i tion. Con trary to Surrealism , i t is an
attemp t at restoration rather than a revolu tion. Protestan tism
and Romanticism had separated the Anglo-Sax on world from
the religious and aesthe tic trad i tion of Europe : Anglo-American
"modernism" is a return to this tradition . A return? I have
already indicated its involuntary resemblance to Germ an
Romanticism . I ts denial of Romanticism was also Romantic :
the reinterpre tation of Dante and the Provenal poe ts by
Pound and Eliot was no less eccentric than the reading o f
Calderon b y the German Romantics a cen tury earlier. The posi
tion o f the terms is inverted bu t the terms d o not disappear,
(
nor does the rel ationship between them i Anglo-Americ an
"modernism " is ano ther version o f the European avant-garde),

/
1 34
just as French Symbolism and Spanish American "modernismo"

had been other versions of Romanticism . Versions: me taphors :
transmu tations.
The Anglo-American "restora tion" was no less profound and
radical a change than was the Surrea list "revolu tion . " Th is
observation is applicable not only to the Can tos and Tlze Waste
Land bu t also to the poe try of Wallace S tevens, e. e. cum mi ngs,
and William Carlos Williams. I have referred almost ex clusively
to Pound and Eliot because there is in both of them a critical
and programmatic face t which d oes not appear in other poets of
this genera tion . Apart from this, I do not believe that those
poets are less important than Pound and Eliot. Bu
t('importan t"
is a foolish word : each poet is d i fferen t , unique, irreplaceable.

Poetry cannot be measured ; it is nei ther small nor grea t - i t
),)
is simply poe try Without the verb al explosions of cummings,

resulting from 11is ex treme and admirable poetic concentration ;
without the transparency and d ensity of Wallace S tevens'
"Esthetique du mal" and "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction , "
poems in which , as in "The Prelude , " the gaze o f the p oe t
(now disenchan ted a n d freed from romantic and avan t-gard e
mirages) traces a bridge be tween " the mind and the sky" ;
wi thou t the poems of Williams, who, as S tevens sai d , gave u s "a
new knowledge of reali ty" -modern Anglo-American p oe try
would be greatly impoverished . And we also .
Anglo-American cosm op ol itanism started a s a radical formal
ism . It is precisely this formalism-poetic collages in Pound
and Eliot, verbal transgressions and combinations in cummings
and Stevens-which links Anglo-Saxon modernism to the
European and Latin American avant-gardes. Al though it pro-_
1 35
claimed itself an an ti-Roman tic reaction. Anglo-American

formalism was nothing but ano ther manifestation of the duality
hich has been present in modern poetry from its i nception :
analogy and irony . Pound 's poetic system consists of p resenting
-
images as clusters of signs upon the page : ideograms, n ot static

but moving, l ike a landscape seen from a ship or, rather, l ike
constellations moving toward or away from each other o n
the surface of the sky . The word "constella tion" calls forth the
idea of music ; and the word "musi c , " with its innumerable
associations from the erotic harm ony of bodies to poli tical
harmony among men, conjures up the name of Mallarm e . Here
is the heart of analogy . Pound is not a disciple of Mallarme,
but the best part of his work belongs in the tradition begun by
Un coup de des . In the Can tos as in Th e Waste Land analogy

is continuously torn apart by cri ticism , by ironic consciousness.
Mallarme and Duchamp : analogy ceases to be a vision and
turns into a system of p ermu tations. Like the erotic-industrial ,
mythic-ironic duality of the Large Glass , all the characters in
The Waste Land are real and mythic . Reversibility of signs and
significances : in Duchamp ; Artemis is a "pin-up ," and in Eliot

the image of heaven and i ts rotating constellations turn s into
a deck of cards spread ou t on a table by a fortune-teller. The
image o f cards leads to that of dice, and the latter once again to
the image of the constellations. I n the mirror of the e m p ty
room described in the "Sonnet en ix," Mallarme sees the seven
stars of the Great Bear reflected like seven notes which "relient
au ciel seul ce logis abandonne du monde . " In A rcane 1 7
(once again Tarot and the magic of the cards), Andre B re ton
looks from the window of his room and sees the night doubly
night, earthly night echoed by the nigh t of twentieth-cen tury
136
history, u n til gradually the black sq uare of the window , l ike

Mallarme's mirror, is lit up and an image is outlined : "seven
fl owers which turn into seven stars. " The rotation of signs
is really a spiral , in whose curves appear, disappear, and reappear,
al ternately masked and nake d , the two sisters-analogy and
irony. A n anonymous collective poem of which each of u s is a
stanza, a handful of syllables, rather than au thor or reader.
There is a c urious similarity between the history of modern

poetry i n Spanish and in E nglish . A t almost the same time
Anglo-Ameri can and Spanish American poets left their native
lands ; they absorbed new trends in Europ e , transforming and
changing them ; they leapt over two formi dable obstacles (the
Pyrenees and the English Channel ) ; they burst onto the scene in
Madrid a nd London, awakening the drowsy Spanish and English
poets ; their innovators (Pound and Huidobro) were ac cused of
Gall ican and cosmop olitan heresies ; contact with the new trends
led two great poets of the previous generation (Yea ts and
Jimenez) to d o ff their Symbolist robes and write their best
poems near the end of their l ives ; the initi al cosmop oli tanism
soon produ ced negation : the Americanism of Williams and
of Vallej o . The oscillations between cosmopolitanism and
Ameri canism display our dual temp tation , our common mirage :
the land we left behind , Europe , and the land w e seek , Ameri ca.
The similari ty between the evol u tion of A nglo-American and
Spanish American literature resu lts from the fact that both
are written in transplanted languages. B e tween ourselves and
the American soil a void opened up which we had to fill with
strange words. I nd ians and mestizos included , our lang uage is
1 37
European . The history of our li teratures is the history of

our relations with the place tha t is America, and also with the
place where the word s we speak were born and came o f age .
In the beginning our let ters were a reflection of Europ ean ones.
Howeve r, in the seventeenth cen tury a singular variety of
baroq ue poe try was born in Spanish America that was no t only
the exaggeration but at times the transgression of the Spanish
model . The first great A merican poet was a woman , Sor J uana
lnes de Ia Cruz. Her poem El Suerzo ( 1 69 2 ) was our first cos
mopol itan tex t ; like Pound and Borges later, the Mexican nun
built a tex t as a tower-again, Tower of Babe l . As another
example of her cosm op ol i tan ism , in other poems the M e xican
note appears together w ith a mix ture of language s : La tin ,
Castilian , Nalniatl , Portuguese , I ndian, mestizo, and mula t to
dialects. Sor J uana's Americanism , like that of Borges, is a
cosmopolitanism ; this breed of cosmopoli tanism also expresses
a Mex ican and Argentinian mode of ex istence . I f it occurs to
Sor Juana to speak of pyramid s , she cites those of Egy p t , not of
Teotihuacan ; if she writes an au to sacramen tal su ch as El divino
Narciso , the pagan worl d is personified not by a Greek or Latin
divini ty but by the pre-Col ombian god of the harvests.
The strain between cosmopolitanism and American ism,
be tween cul tured and colloquial language , is constant in Spanish
American poe try from the time of Sor Juana I nes de I a Cruz.
Among the Spanish American modernistas at the end of the
last century, cosmopoli tanism was the dominant tende ncy in the
early phase of the movement, b u t , as I have shown , the reaction
toward colloquialism , critical and ironic ( the so-called "post
modernism o " ) , sprang from the heart of the movement itself.
1 38
Around 1 9 1 5 Spanish American poe try became charac terized

by regionalism , love for conversational speech, and ironic view
of the world and of man . When Lugones speaks of the corner
barber, this barber is no symbol but a being marvelous just
because he is the corner barber. Lopez Velarde ex tolls the
power of a mustard seed , a ffinning that his voice is "Ia gemela
de Ia canela" (twin of the cinnamon). I n Spain , Spanish Ameri can
colloquialism w as transformed into the reconquest of the rich
vein of trad i tional poetry , both med ieval and modern. In
Antonio M achado and Juan Ramon J imenez the aesth e ti c (and
the ethic) of the immen se smallness also pred ominated : uni
verses fi t into a couplet . S ome young men followed other path s :
a symbol ism endowed with a classical con sciousness (m ore or
less inspired by Valery), as, for instance , Alfonso Reyes in his
lfigenia cruel ( 1 924 ) ; or a poetry stripped of everything p ic
turesque , like that of Jorge Guillen. But the ex treme a lternative
was the appearance of a new cosmopolitanism , no longer bound
up with Symbolism , but with the French avant-garde of Apol
linaire and Reverd y . As in 1 8 8 5 , the initiator was a Sp anish
American : at the end of 1 9 1 6 the young Chilean poet Vicente
Huid obro arrived in Paris ; soon afterward , in 1 9 1 8 in M adri d , he
published Ecuatorial and Poemas A rticos . With them the Spanish
avant-garde commenced .
Huidobro w as worshiped and reviled . His poe try and his ideas
inspired m any young poets, and two movements were born
from his example , the Spanish and the Argentinian "ul tra
ismo" -both angrily rejected by the poet as imitations of his
"creacionism o . " Huidobro's ideas are undeniably similar to
/'
those which Reverdy was then expounding : the poe t d oes not
1 39
copy real i t y , he prod uces i t . Huidobro affirmed tha t the poet

imitates not nature but its modus operandi : he makes poetry as
the rain and the earth make trees. Williams said something
similar in the prose pieces interspersed in the first edition of
Spring and A ll ( 1 9 23 ) : the poet produces poetic objec ts as
'\
electricity produces l igh t . B u t Huidobro resembles cummings
rather than Williams. Botl1 are descendants of Apollina ire ,
both are lyrical and erotic, both scandalized with their syntactic
and typographic innovations . cummings is m ore concen trated
and perfect ; Huidobro more vast. His language was international
(that is one of his limitations), and more visual than sp oken .
Not a language of earth but of aerial space . An aviator's lan
guage : the words are parachu tes which open in midair. Before
touching earth they burst and are dissolved in colored explo
sions. H uidobro 's great poem is A ltaz or ( 1 93 1 ) : the hawk
assaulting the heigh ts and disappearing , burned up by the sun.
Words lose their meaningful weight and become not signs
but traces of an astral catastrophe . The Romantic myth o f
Lucifer reappears i n the form o f the aviator-poe t .
Spanish American avant-garde and Anglo-American "modern
ism " were as much transgressions of the canons of London
and Madrid as flights from Ameri can provincialism . In both
movements oriental poe try , especially haiku , exercised a benefi
cent influence . The poet who introduced haiku into Castilian
was J ose J uan Tablada, who also wrote ideographic and simul
taneist poems. B u t these are formal similarities. Opposed cos
mopolitanisms : what Pound and Eliot sough t i n Europe was
the exact opposite of what H uidobro , Oliverio Girond o , and the
Borges of those years were seeking. Anglo-American m odernism
1 40
sough t to return to Dante and to Provence ; the Span ish

Americans proposed to carry to its ex tremes their revolt against
tha t tradition . Accordingl y , Huid obro never denied Daria :
his "creacionismo" was not the rejection of modernism o b u t
its I W i l plus ultra .
I n the beginning Spanish American avan t-garde depended on
the French , as before the first modernistas had followed the
Parnassians and Symbolists. The revolt against the new cosmo
politan isnl again assumed the form of nativism or Ame ricanism .
Cesar Vallej o 's first book (Los lzeraldos negros , 1 9 1 8 ) ex tended
the poeti c line of Lugones. In his second book (Trilce , 1 9 2 2 )
this Peruvian poet assimilated the in ternational forms o f the
avant-garde , internalizing the m . A true translation, or rather,
transmu tation . Huidobro 's opposite n mnber : poetry of the
earth , not of the air. Not of any earth : one h istory, one tongue.
Peru : men/stones/dates. I ndian and Spanish signs. The language
of Trilce could only be that of a Peruvian , but of a Peruvian
who was also a poet who saw the man within each Peruvian, and
the witness and victim within each man . Vallej o was a great
religious p oe t . A militant Commu nist, the background of his
vision of the world and of his beliefs was not the cri ti cal
philosophy of Marxism but the b asic mysteries of the Christi
ani ty of his childhood and of his race : commu nion, transub
stantiation, longing for immortali ty . His verbal inve n tions
impress us not only because of the ir ex traordinary concen tra
tion but for their authen ticity . S ome times we stumble over
his failures of expression, awkwardnesses, stammers . I t does not
matter : even his least su ccessful p oems are alive.
Nativism and Americanism appear in many poets of this
141
period . For instance , in the Borges of Fervor de Buenos A ires

( 1 923 ), which contains a series of admirable poems dedicated to
death and to the d ead . I n the Uni ted S tates, too, reaction to
Eliot 's cosmopolitanism broke ou t, a reaction represe n ted
principally by Williams and "objectivists" like Louis Z ukofsky
and George Oppen . The simi larity , once again , is formal . The
Anglo-Americans, faced with the landscape of the indu strial age ,
interested themselves above a l l i n the obj e ct-its geometry, its
internal and external relations, its meaning-and felt scarcely
any nostalgia for the pre-industrial worl d . In the Spanish
Americans this nostalgia was an essential element . Ind ustry
does not appear in the Anglo-Americans as a theme b u t as a
conte x t . Propertius' modernity consists not in the theme of the
great city but in the fact that the great city appears in his
poems withou t the poe t 's having expressly intended it : th e
same is true of Williams. On the other hand, some Spanish
American poets, Carlos Pellicer and J orge Carrera Andrade,
use terms and metaphors of the m odern world to depi ct the
American landscape : aviation and Virgil . I t is revealing that in
Pellicer's poetry pre-Colombian ruins occupy the same favored
place as the magic of the industrial obj ect in a Zukofsky poem .
Recapitulation of the episodes of modernism o : Spanish
American colloquialism and nativism were transformed in Spain
into traditionalism -the ballads and songs of Federico Garcia
Lorca and Rafael Alberti . The influence of J uan Ram on
J imenez was decisive in orienting the young Spanish p oetry .
However, in 1 92 7 , the three hundredth anniversary of Gongora 's
death , the direction changed . The rehabili ta tion of Gongora
was initiated by Ruben Daria , and studies by various eminent
1 42
critics foll owed . B u t the resu rre ction of the great And alusian
poet results from two circumstances : the first is that a m ong the
cri tics was a poe t , D'imaso A lonso ; the second , decisive factor
is the coincidence which the young Spaniard s noticed between
Gongora 's aesthetic and that of th e avant-garde . In his A n tologia
poetica en honor de Gongora (Madrid, 1 9 2 7 ) , the poe t Gerard o

Diego emphasizes that the important thing is to create verbal
objects (poems) "made of words onl y , " Jd "which should be
_
more like spells than verses." The aesthetic of Reverdy and of
Huidobro . The same Gerardo Diego later published a memorable
poem , Fdbula de Equis y Zeda ( 1 93 2 ) , in which baroque
elements are combined with creacionismo . I n the minds o f
Spanish p oets the formalism o f the avant-garde was associated
with Gongora 's formalism . Nor is it strange that d uring these
years Jose Ortega y Gasset should publish La deslwmanizaci6n
del arte .
Two p oets resisted both trad i tionalism and neo-Gongorism :
Pedro Salinas and Jorge Guillen . The form er composed a kind of
lyrical monologue in which the th ings of modern life -movies,
automobiles, telephones, rad iators-are reflected in the clear
waters of an eroticism which stems from Provence . Guillen's
work , as I once wrote, "is an island and a bridge . " An island ,
since i n the face of the upheaval of the avan t-garde Guillen had
the incredible insolence to say that perfection is also revolu
tionary ; a bridge , becau se "from the beginning Guillen was
a master, as much for his con temporaries (Garcia Lorca) as for
those of us who came later . "
A new breach : the parasurrealist explosion . I n English
speaking countries the i n flue nce of Surrealism was belated and
1 43
The Closing o f the Circle
superficial (until the appearance of Frank O 'Hara and John

Ashberry , in the fifties). On the contrary , it was early and very
profound in Spain and Spanish America. I say "influence"
because , although there were artists and poe ts who participated
individually in different period s of S urrealism -Picabi a , Bunuel,
Dali, Min) , M atta, Lam, Cesar M o ro, and I myself-neither in
Spain nor in America was there Surrealist activity in th e strict
sense . (An ex ception : the Chilean group Mandragora , founded in
1 93 6 by B raulio Arenas, Gonzalo Roj as, Enrique Gomez-Correa,
and others.) Many poets of that p eriod ad opted onirism and
other surrealist procedures, but it cannot be claimed that
Neruda, A lberti, or A lexaindre were Surrealists, despite the fact
that in certain moments of their work , their searches a nd
discoveries coincided with those of the Surrealists. I n 1 9 3 3 a
book by Pablo Neruda, R esidencia en Ia tierra , appeare d in
Madrid . A n essen tial book . Huidobro 's poetry evokes the
element of air ; Vallej o's, that of the soil ; Nerud a 's, of the water.
Ocean m ore than lake . Neruda's influence was like a fl ood
which spreads and covers miles and miles-con fused , p owerful,
somnambulan t , shapeless w aters . Those years saw a we alth of
production : Poeta en Nueva York ( 1 9 2 9 ) , probably Federico
Garcia L orca 's best b ook , containing some of the most intense
poems o f this century , such as the "Oda a Wal t Whitm an" ;
Vicente Aleixandre's La destrucci6n o el amor ( 1 93 5 ) , a
vision of erotic passion at once d ark and sumptuous ; Sermones y m oradas ( 1 93 0 ) o f Rafael Alberti-a subversion
of the language of religion which starts to rave and pu ts bombs
on altars and in confessionals ; No cturnos ( 1 93 3 ) of Xavier
Villaurru tia, which con tains six or seven of the best poems of
1 44
the decade -metallic, brillian t, anguished poetry , the d ual

voice of d esire and sterility ; Ricardo Molinari , whose strange
high noon contains trees with no shade ; Luis Cern uda , he who
most bril liantly and courageously accep ts the duality of the
word pleasure -active criticism of so cial morali ty and the door
leading to death . The Spanish Civil war and World War I I
put a n end to this period. The Spanish poets were disp ersed
and the Spanish Americans isola ted.
M any of these poets moved from i ndividual revolt to social
revol t . Some j oined the Comm unist Party , o thers the cul tural
organizations which the Stalinists had created in the shad ow of
the Popu lar Fronts. The result was the manipulat ion of m any
generous impulses-though one cannot discoun t a con temp tible
dose of opportunism -by Commu nist bureau cracies. Poets ac
quired "socialist realism " and practiced the poetry of social and
political propaganda. The verbal search and the poetic adven
ture were sacrificed on the al tars of clarity and political e fficacy.
A large part of those poems have disappeared as the columns
a.t:J.d editorials of newsp apers disappeared . They sought to
bear wi tness to history , and history has obliterated the m. The
most serious thing was not the lack of poetic but of moral
tension : the hymns and odes to S talin, Molotov, Mao- an d the
more or less rhymed i nsults to Trotsky , Tito , and othe r d issi
dents. A curious realism which forced i ts au thors to con tradict
themselves after Khrushchev's revelations. Yesterday's truths
are today's lies : where is real ity? That was the era of the
"poets' dishonor," as Benj amin Pere t called it.
Even those who refused to place their art at the service of a
party almost comple tely renounced poetic experimentation
1 45
and inve n tion . There was a general re treat to order. Political

didacticism and neoclassical rhetori c . The old avant-ga rd ists
Borges, Villaurrutia-devoted themselves to writing sonne ts and
decimas . Two books representa tive of the best and the worst
of this p eriod are the Can to general ( 1 9 5 0 ) of Pablo Neruda , and
J ose Gorostiza 's Muerte sin fin ( 1 93 9 ) . The former is e normous,
disj ointed , confused , though interspersed here and there by
passages of great materialist poe try : tide-language and lava
language . The other is a poem of some eight hundred b lank
verses , a discourse in wh ich intellectual consciousness bends the
flow of language until i t freezes it into a hard transparency :
rhetoric and great poetry. Two ex treme s : the passiona te yes
and the reflective no. A monument to l oquaci ty and a monu
ment to reticence .
About 1 945 poetry i n o u r langu age divided i n to t w o acade
mies; tha t of "socialist realism " and that of the repentant
avant-garde . The change was initiated by a few books from a
scat tering of poets. Here ends all pre tension to obje ctivity : even
if I wanted to , I could not dissociate myself from this period .
I shall therefore try to reduce i t to a few essen tial poin ts. I t all
begins with a book by J ose Lezama Lima , La fijeza ( 1 944 ).
Then , in 1 949 ( I cannot avoid mentioning it) I published
Libertad bajo palabra and in 1 95 1 Aguila o sol? A t almost

the same time, i n Buenos Aires, appeared Enrique M olina's
Costumbres erran tes o Ia redondez de Ia tierra ( 1 9 5 1 ) . A little

later, Nicanor Parra , Alberto Girri , J aime Sabines, Cin tio
Vitier, R oberto Juarroz . . . These names and these books are
not all of contemporary Span ish American poetry ; they are

i ts beginning . To speak of what has followed , imp ortant though
i t is, would mean to wri te a chronicle .
1 46
The beginning : a clandestine, almost invisible ac tion . A t first

almost n obody paid attention to i t . In a certai n sense i t marked
the return of the avant-garde. B u t a silent, secretive , d isil l u
sioned avant-garde . An o ther avan t-garde, self-critical and
ngaged i n solitary rebellion against the academy which the
first avant-garde had become. I t w as not a question of inventing,
as in 1 92 0 , but of exploring. The territory which attracted these
poets was neither outside nor inside. I t was the zone where
ex ternal and internal merge : the zone of language . Theirs was
not an a esthetic preoccupation ; for these young men language
was, simultaneously and contradictorily , their destiny and their
choice . Something given and some thing we make-and which
makes us.
Language is the man b u t also the world . It is history and
biography : others and myself. The new poets had learned to
reflect and to make fun of themselves : they knew that the poet
is the tool of language. They also knew that the world did not
begin wi th them , but they did not know whether it would end
with them they had lived through N azism , Stalinism , and the
!
atomic explosions in Japan. Their lack of communication with

Spain was almost total, not only because of the political
circumstances but because the postwar Spanish poets l i ngered in
the rhetori c of social or religious poe try . They were at tracted
by Surrealism , a waning movement, and considered the p ost
modernist nglo-America n poe ts- Lowel l , Olson , Bishop ,
Ginsberg-as their true contemporaries , even if (or because) the
Anglo-Americans were emerging fro m the opposi te sid e of the
mo dern tradition. They also discovered the poetry of Pessoa, and
through it the work of the B razilian and Portuguese poets of
their _generation, such as Cabral de Melo. Although some of them
1 47
we re Ca tholics and others Com munist s , they leaned toward

individualistic d issidence , oscillating be tween Trotskyism and
anarchism. But it would be absurd to p u t ideologi cal tags
on them . In the face of world events they felt horror for
Western civil ization and , at the same time, attraction for the
East , the primitives, or pre-ColUinbian America. Theirs was a
sort of religious atheism , a religious rebellion against re ligion. I t
was more a search for an Erotica than for a new Poetics. Almost
all identified themselves with Camus' words from those second
postwar days : "solitaire solidaire . " I t was a generation which
accepted marginality and made of it their true homeland .
Post-avant-garde poetry (I don't know if we must resign our
selves to this nam e , which some critics are beginning to give us)
was born as a silen t rebellion of isolated men . It started as an
insensible change which , ten years later, showed itself to be
irreversible. Between cosmopolitanism and Americanis m , my
generation made a clean and perm anent break : we are con
demned to be Ameri cans as our fathers and grandfathers were
condemned t o seek America or flee from her. Our leap has
been within ourselves .
Th e Twiligh t of the A van t-Garde

Opposition of the modern age works within the age . To
criticize i t is one of the functions of the modern spiri t ; and
even more, one way of ful fi lling i t . The modern age is the age of
schism and of self-negation , the age of criticism . I t has identi
fied itself with change, change wi th cri ticism , and both with
progress . M odern art is modern because i t is critical . I ts criticism
1 48
unfolded in two contradic tory d irections : i t rej ected the linear

time of the modern age and i t rej ected itself.. By the first it
denied modernity ; by the second affirmed it. Faced w i th
hi story and its changes, i t postula ted the timeless time of the
origins, the moment, or the cycle ; faced with its own tradition ,
i t postulated change and criticism . Each artistic movem e n t
rejected i t s predecesso,r, a n d through each of these rej e ctions
art perpetuated itsel f( Only within linear time can reje ction
develop to the ful l , and only in a cri tical age like ours can
criticism be creative . Today we wi tness another mu tation :
modern art is beginning to lose its powers of nega tion. For some
years now its rejections have been ritual repeti tions : re bellion
has turned into procedure , cri ti cism into rhe toric, transgression
into cerem ony . Negation is no longer creative. I am not saying
that we are living the end of art : we are l iving the end of the
idea of modern art . "
Art and poetry a re inseparable from our earthly destiny : art

existed as soon as man became man and will exist unti l man
disappears . But our ideas as to what art is, from the magic vision
of the primitives to the Man ifestes of Surrealism , are as m any
and as d iverse as are societies and civilizations. The decline
of the trad i tion against itself m anifests the general crisis of the
modern era . I have dealt with this theme in some of my wri tings ;
here I will confine myself to a brief enumera tion of th e m ost
obvious symptoms. In the first two chapters 1 showed that our
idea of time is the resul t of a critical process : the destruction
9f Christian eternity was followed by the secularization of... its
alues and its transposition into another category of time.
The modern age begins with the revolt of the future . Within the
1 49
perspective of medieval Christiani ty the fu ture was mortal :

the Last Judgment was to be the d ay of its abolition and the
adven t of an eternal present. The critical process of the modern
age i nverted the term s : the only e ternity known to man was
that of the fu ture . For the medieval Christian earthly l i fe came
to rest in the everlasting existence of either good or bad ; for
modern man it is an endless march toward the future . Tha t is
where , th e heigh t of p erfection lies, not in an eternal l i fe beyond
dea th ., Now, in the second half of the twentieth cen tury, certain
signs iildicate a change in our system of beliefs. The conception
of history as a progressive and linear process has been proved
i nconsistent. That belief was born with the modern age, and , to
a certain extent , h as been i ts raison d 'etre . The looseni ng of
its hold reveals a fissure in the very heart of the con temp orary
consciousness : the modern era is beginning to l ose faith i n i tself.
The belief i n history as a con tinuous march , notwith standing
some stumbles and falls, took many forms. Sometimes i t
w a s a naive application o f Darwinism to the realms of history
and society ; a t other times i t was a vision of the historical
process as the progressive realization of freedom , justice, reason,
or some other similar value. In yet other cases history came
to be identified with the d evelopment of science and technology
or wi th man's dominion over Nature or with the universaliza
tion of culture. All these ideas have something in common : i t is
man's destiny to colonize the fu ture. I n recent years there has
been a sharp change : people begin to look fearfu l ly toward the
future , and what only y esterday seemed the m arvels of progress
have become its disasters. The fu ture is no l onger the storehouse
of perfection b u t of horror. Demographers, ecologists, soci-
1 50
ologists , physicists, and geneticists are denouncing the march

toward the fu ture as a march toward destruction . Some foresee
the exhaustion of natural resources, others the contamination
of the e arth i tself, others an atomic flare-u p . The achievements
of progress are called hunger, tox ic poisoning, volatilization.
I am not concerned here as to whe ther or not these prophecies
are exaggera ted : I want to emphasize that they are expressions
of a gen eral doubt abou t progress . It is significant that in a
country like the United States, where the word "change"
has enj oyed a superstitious reverence , another has app eared
which refu tes it u tterly : "conservation . " The present has
become critical of the fu ture and is beginning t o displa ce it.
Marxism was probably the most coherent and most d a ring
expression of history as a progressive and linear process. The
most coherent because i t conceives of history as a process
with the rigor of rational discourse ; the most d aring because the
discourse embraces the past and presen t as we ll as the fu ture of
the human race . S cience and prophecy . Fo r)yl arx history
is a single process-the same for all mankind -that u nfolds like a

mathematical series or logical proposition . Each proposition
generates an apposition resolved in an affirmation . I n this way ,
through nega tions and contrad i ctions, new stages are evolved.
History is like a text which begets other tex ts. I t is a p rocess
which m oves from the communism of primitive society to thaC
of the industrial era. The pro tagonists of this process a re the
social classes, propel led by the force of differen t productive
techniques. E ach historical period m arks an advance on the
preceding one , and in each period one social class takes upon
i tself the represen tation of all humanity : feudal aristocracy,
151
bourgeoisie , proletariat. The latter embod ies the historical

present and i ts immediate fu ture . I repeat what we all know : if
the violent changes of the twentie th century confirm M arx's
apocalypti c vision, the form i n which they have come abou t
denies the supposed rational i ty of the historical process.
The absence of proletarian revolutions in more industrially
advanced countries, like the revolts on the fri nges of the
Western world , show that Marxist ideology has not fom ented
-
the workers' world revolu tion nor real socialism but only the
national resurrection of Russia, China, and other coun tries slow
to reach the age of industry and technology . The_protagonists
of these changes were not the workers, but classes and groups
hich M arxtst theory placed at the edge or in the rearof
-
the historical process : intellectuals, peasants, l ower middle class.

-
More serious still : the revolu tiOns which triumphed have been
transformed into regimes which a re anomalous from a strict
M arxist point of view . It is a historical aberration that socialism
should take on the form of d ictatorship by a new bure au cratic
class or caste . The aberration disappears if we give up the con
cep tion of history as a progressive , linear process blessed
with an immanent rationality . I t is hard to resign ourselves to
this because giving up this belief implies the end of our claims
to shape the fu ture . Nevertheless, i t is not a renunciation of
socialism as e thical and political free choice , but of the idea of
socialism as a necessary product of the historical proce ss.
Cri ticism of the poli tical and moral aberrations of con temporary
"socialisms" should begin wi th criticism of our in t llec tual
aberrations. History is not single : i t is p lural ; it is the h istory of
men and of the marvelous diversity of societies and civilizations
1 52
which men have crea ted . Our fu ture , our idea of the fu ture ,
totters and hesitates : the plurality of pasts makes p lausible the
idea of a plurali ty of fu tures.
The revolts in underdeveloped countries and on the fringe
of industrialized societies belie the p revisions of revolu tionary
thought ; the rebellions and d isorders in the more advanced
countries u ndermine even more thoroughly the idea of the
future which evolutionists, l iberals, and progressive bo urgeois
had made for themselves. I t is rem arkable that the class to
which the revolutionary vocation per se was attributed has not
shared in the disturbances which have shaken the industrialized
societies . Recently an attempt has been made to explain this
phenomenon by a new social category : the more advanced
societies, especially the United S ta tes, have now passed from
the industrial to the postindustrial age . The lat ter is character
ized by the importance given to what could be called the
production of productive knowledge , i n other words, a new
mode of production in which k nowledge occupies the central
position hitherto held by industry . Soci al struggles in the
.......
postindust rial society are not the result of the opposition \
!>e tween labor and c;api t conflicts in the cultura l , reli
i us,
and psychic spheres. Thus, the student disorders of the last

--..:
decaa e can be seen as an i nstinctive rebellion against the exces
sive rationalization of social and individual life demanded by

this new mode of production . Di fferent m odes of dehumaniza
tio n : capitalism treated men like machines ; the postindu strial
society treats them like signs.
Whatever value there may or may not be in lucubrations on
the postindustrial society, the fact is tha t , despite their j u st
1 53
and p assionate rejection of the present state of things, rebellions

in developed coun tries do not offer programs for the o rganiza
ti on of the society of the future . For this reason I call them
rebellions, not revolutions. This i ndifference toward th e shape
the fu ture should take distinguishes the new radicalism from
the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century and the
first half of the twentieth . Confidence in the strength of spon
taneity exists in inverse proportion to the disgust toward
systematic construct The d iscredi ting of the future wi th its
geometric paradises i'wtdespread . Nor is this strange : in the
name of building the fu ture half of the p lanet has been covered
with forced labor camps. '[he rebellion of youth is a m ovement

of rejection of the present , bu t it is not an a ttempt to build
a new society . The young people want to end the present
situation precisely beca use it is a present which oppresses us
in the name of a chimerical fu ture . They have the insti nctive
but confu sed hope that the destruction of this present will
bring ab out the sudden appearance of the oth er presen t with
its corporal, intuitive , and magical values. Always that search
for the o th er time , the real time.
In rebellions of e thnic and cultural min ori ties, demands for
economic red istribu tion are not the only , nor often the centra l ,
issues. Blacks a n d Chicanos are struggli ng for recognition of
their identity . Something similar is taking place with w omen's
liberation movements and even with those of sexual m inoritie s :
it is n o t so much a question of erecting the city o f the fu ture
as of the emergence, within contemp orary society, of groups
searching for identity or struggling for recognition . Nor d o
the nationalist and anti-imperialist movements, wars o f Iibera-
1 54
tion, and other disturbances of the Third World fit into the
idea of revolu tion worked out by the linear and progre ssive con
ception of history . These movements are the expression o f
particularisms which were humiliated during the period o f
Western expansion , and for this reason they have become
models for the struggles of e thnic minori ties in the Un ited
States and elsewhere . The revolts in the Third World and the
rebellions of ethnic and national minorities in industri alized
societies are the uprisings of particularisms oppressed by
another particularism wearing the m ask of universality :
Western capitalism ."i Marxism foresaw the disappearance of the
proletariat as a class immediately after the d isappearance of
the bourgeoisie ; the dissolution of classes corresponde d to the
universa lization of mankind . Contemporary movements tend
in the opposite direction : they are affirmations qf each group 's
individu ality, and even of sexual idiosyncrasies/ M arxism
postu lated a future in which all classes and peculiarities would
dissolve in one universal society ; today's struggle is for recogni
tion here and now of the concrete and individual reali t y of
each and every one . i
.
All these rebell ions appear as a breach i n the idea of linear

tim e . They are the irruption of the offended present and
thus, explicitly or implicitly, postulate a d evaluation o f the
future . The background for these rebel lions is the changed
sensibility of the age . Decay of the Protestant and Cap i ta list
ethic with its moral code of savings and work : two ways of
shaping the future , two attemp ts to get the fu ture into our
power . The insurrection of corporal and orgiastic values is a
rebel lion against man's twofold p enalty -condemnatio n to
1 55
work and repression of desire . F or Christianity th e human body

was fa/leu Nature , but divine grace could transfigure it in to
the glorious body . Capitalism d e consecrated the body ; it ceased
to be a battlefield for angels and devils and became a work
tool . The conception of the body as a tool led to its d egrada
tion as a source of pleasure . Asceticism changed ; instead of
a means to ge t to heaven , it became a technique to increase
produ ctivi t y . Pleasure is a waste , sen suality an embarrassment.
To cond emn pleas ure was to condem n the imagination because
ody is not onl:t a wellspring of sensations bu t of i m .

.
The d isorders of the imagination are no less prej udicial to

production and optimum output than physical shud ders of
sensual pleasure . I n the name of the future the censure o f the
body culmina ted in the mutila tion of man's poetic powers.
_..
Nowadays the rebellion of the body is also that of the imaginatiOI? . B o th rej ect l inear time : their values are those of the
present.; The body and the imagination do not know the fu ture ;
. .
sensatidns are the aboli tion of time in the instantaneous

mome n t , the images of desire dissolve past and fu tu re in a
timeless present." Lt is the return to the beginning of the b
ning, to the sensibility and passion of the Roman tics. [fhe

-4
resurrection of the body may be an omen that man will eventually recover his lost wisdom . The body not only rejects the
future : it is a path toward the p resent, toward that here and now
'1
where li fe and death are two halves of one and the same sphere
These various signs signal a change in our image of time. At
the beginning of the modern era , Christian e ternity lost its
ontological reality as well as its l ogical coherence ; i t became a
senseless proposition , an emp ty word . Today , the fu ture seems
1 56
o less u nreal than e ternit;t. From Hume to M arx , criticism

of religion by philosophy is applicab le to the future : it is not
real and it robs us of reality ; it d oes not exist and it ro bs us
of life . Yet t_l}e <;riJique_ of the future has been made not
by philosophy but by the body and by the imagination.
The Ancients overesteemed the past . To confront its tyranny,
man i nvented an e thic and an aesthe tic of exceptions based
on the i nstant . Against the rigors of the past and of precedents,
he opposed the freedom of the i nstant : neither a before nor
an after bu t a n ow - the time-ou t-of-time of pleasure , religious
revelation, or poetic vision . In the modern age the instant
also has been a barrier to domination by the fu ture. In opposi
tion to historical time , successive and infinite , modern poetry
since Blake has affirmed the time of origin , the moment of the
beginning. The time of origin is not a bef9 re , i t is a now, t

_
is a reconciliation of the beginning and of the end ; every now is a
beginning and every now s an e n d . The return to the beginning

is a retu rn to the present . )
The vision of the present as a point of convergence o f all
times, originally a vision of p oets, has become the underlying
belief i n the attitudes and ideas of most of our contem poraries.
The pesent has become the cen tral value of the temporal
triad.: The relation between the three times has changed , but
this doe s not imply the disappearance of the p ast or o f the
future . On the contrary , they gain more reality : they become
dimensi ons of the prese n t , both are present -both are presences
in the now. The time has come to bu ild an E thics and a Politics
upon the Poeti cs of the now.\ Politics ceases to be a construction
of the future ; its mission is t 6 make the present habitable .
1 57
The ethics of now is not hedonistic in the ordinary sense of

the word , although i t affirms both p leasure and the sen ses. The
present reveals that the end is neither d ifferent from n or
opposed to the beginning, but i ts complement , its inseparable
half. To live in the present is to l ive facing death . Ma l!J n v e_nt

_
eternity and the future to escape death , but each of these
inventions was a fatal trap . The prese n t reconciles us with reality :
we are m ortal . 9_!!1Y facing death , life is really life . Within the
now , death is not separated from life . Both are the same reality,
__
the same fruit .

The end of the modern era , the fall of the future, can be
seen in a rt and in poetry as an acceleration which dissolves the
notion of fu ture as well as that of change . The future i nstantly
becomes the pas t ; changes are so swift that they produce the
sensation of immobility . The idea of chage was the corner
stone of modern p oetry , rather than the changes themselve s :
today's art must d i ffer from yesterday's. Now , to perceive the
difference betw,>en y esterday and today there must be a
certain rhyth lll\.1 I f changes come about very slowly they run the
risk of being cot"fused with immobility . This was what happened

with the art of the past : neither artists nor public, hyp notized
by the idea of "imitation of the ancients , " cou ld perceive
changes with clari t y . We cannot perceive them today , bu t for

the opposite reaso n : they disappear as rapid ly as they appear.
Actually they are not change s ; they are variations of earlier
models. Imitation of the moderns has sterilized more talents
than imitation of the ancients. We must add proliferation
to false speed : not only do avant-garde m ovemen ts die almost
1 58
Child ren of the Mire
as soon as they are born , but they spread like weeds. D iversity is
resolved in uniformity. The fragmentation of the avan t-garde
into hundreds of identical movements : in the anthill d i fferences
disappea
rJ
Romanticism brought the mjxture of genres. Symbolis T
and the avant-garde completed the fusion of prose and poetry .

The results were marvel ous monsters, from Rimbaud's prose
poem to J oyce's verbal epic. The mix ture and ul timate aboli tion
of genres culminated in the criticism of the art object. The
crisis of the idea of oeuvre became apparent in all the arts
painting , sculpture , poe try , the n ovel-but its m ost rad ical expres
sion was Duchamp 's "ready-mades . " Derisive consecra tion : what
cou n ts i s not the object bu t the artist's act in separa ting i t from
i ts contex t and placing i t on the pedestal of the old work of
art. The gesture takes the place of the work . In China and
Japan m any artists, on discovering a certai n aesthetic i rradia tion
in an anonymous stone , wou ld pick it up and sign thei r name
to i t . This gesture was one of recognition rather than d iscovery .
I t was a ceremony which paid homage to Na ture as a creative
force : Nature creates and the artist recognizes. Ttie context of
Duchamp 's "ready-mades" is not creative Nature bu t i nd ustrial
technol ogy . H is gesture is not an act of choice or of re cognition
but of rejection ; in an atmosphere of non-choice and of i nd i f
ference , Duchamp finds the "ready-mad e , " and his gesture
is the dissolu tion of recognition in the anonym i ty of the object.
His gesture is an act of criticism , not of art, but of art as object .
Since the days o f Romanticism modern poetry had been
cri tical of the subject. Our age has perfected this criticism . The
Surrealists gran ted a primordial fu nction in poetic crea tion
1 59
to the unconscious and to chance ; now some poets emphasize

ideas of permutation and combination. In
1 970, for ex ample,
four poe ts (a Frenchma n , an I talian, an Englishma n , and a

Mexican) decided to compose a collective poem in fou r lan
guages (which they called by the Japan ese name R enga ).

Not only a com nation of different texts but of producers
of texts (poets) The poet is not the "author" in the traditional
sense of the wo
; he is a moment of convergence of the
differen t voices which flow into a tex t . Criticism of the object

and of the subject intersect in our time : the art object dissolves
in the i nstantaneous act, the subject is a somewhat fortuitous

c_ry stallization of languag
he end of art and poe ry? No : the end of the "mod ern era"
and , with i t , the end of the idea of "modern art and literature . "
Cri ticism o f the object prepares the way for the resurrection
of the work of art, not as someth ing to be possessed, but as
a presence to be contemplated. The work is not an end in itself
J.I.
nor does it exist in its own righ t : the work is a bridge , an inter
mediary . Nor does cri ticism of the subj ect imply the d estruc tion
of poet or artist b u t only of the b ourge ois idea of author. For
the Romantics, the voice of the poet was the v oice of all; for us
it is the voice of no one . "All " and "no one " are equal to
each other, and both are equally far from the author and his
"1 . " The poet is not a "little god , " as Huidobro wante d . The
poet disappears behind his own voice, a voice which is his

because it is the voice of language , the voice of no one and of
all . Whatever name we give this voice -inspiration , the un con
scious, chance , acciden t , revelation-it is always the voice of
otherne
1 60
s.D
The aesthetic of change is no less illusory than that of imi ta

tion of the Ancients. One tends to minimize changes, the other
to exaggera te them . The history of the poetic revolu tions
of the m odern age has been none other than the dialogue
between analogy and irony. The former rejected the m odern
age ; the l at ter, analogy . M odern p oe try has been criticism
of the m odern w orld and cri ticism of itself. Cri ticism which
resolves itself in poems, from Hol derlin to Mall arme . Poe try
builds transparent monumen ts out of i ts own fall . B u t irony and
analogy , the image and the bizarre are only moments in the
rotation of signs. The d angers of the aesthetic of change are al so
its virtues : if every thing changes, the aesthetic of change also
changes . This is what is happening today . M odern p oe ts l ooked
-.,
for the p rincipl e of change ; poets of the d awning age l ook for
the unal terable principle that is the root of chang. We wond er
if the Odyssey and A Ia recherche du temps perdu h av e anything
in common . This question , more than denying the ava n t-garde,
is a question which extends beyond it. The aesthetic of change
accentuated the historical nature of the poem . Now we ask : is
there a point where the principle of change blends into th at of
permanence?
The historical character of the p oem is immediately evident
by virtue of its being a tex t which someone has written and
someone else reads. The writing and reading of the poem are
acts that happen ; they take place in time and can be d ated.
They are history . But, from another perspective , the contrary
is also true . While he is writing, the poet d oes not know what
his poem will be like ; he will know only when he reads it,
after it is finished . The au thor is the poem 's first reader, and
161
with his reading a series of interpre ta tions and re-creations

begins. Each reading produces a differen t poem . No reading is
definitive , and i n this sense each reading, not excluding that
of the author, is an accident of the tex t: The text dominates its
author-reader and its subsequent readers. It remains and resists
the changes of each reading. The tex t resists history . At the
same time, the text comes into being only through those
changes. The poem is a trans-historical potentiality actualized
in history, in the reading. There is no p oem in itself, only
in me or in you . F luctuation between the trans-historical and
the historical : without a text there is n o reading, and without a
reading there is no text . The tex t is the condition of the read
i ngs, and the readings realize the tex t , insert it in the sequence
of time . The relation between the tex t and its readings is
con tradictory and necessary .

A poem is a tex t but at the same time i t is a structure. The
tex t rests on the structure-i ts support . The text is visible ,
legible ; the skeleton is invisibl e . All n ovels have similar struc
tures, but Madame Bovary and Th e Turn of the Screw are two
unique , unmistakable texts. The same is true of epic p oems,
sonnets, or fables. The structure of the Odyssey resem bles that
of the A eneid : both obey the same laws of rhetoric, yet each
one is a differen t , irreplaceable text . Each poetic text actualizes
certain structures common to all poems-and each tex t is an
excep tion to and often a violation of these structures. The
texts vary , the structures are constant . Literature is a kingdom
in which each work is unique. Baudelaire fascinates us precisely
with what is his alone and not fou nd in ei ther Racine o r
Mallarm e . In science we seek recurrences and similari ties-laws
1 62
and systems ; ii! l terature, excep tions and surprises-unique

works. A science of lite rature such as that claimed by some
French stru cturalists (certainly n o t J akobson) would be a
science of particular objects. A non-science : a catalogue or
ideal system ceaselessly belied b y the reality of each w ork.
The structure is ahistori c ; the text is history , it bears a date.
From the structure to the text and from the tex t to the reading :
the dialectic of change and of identity. The structure i s invari
able in relation to the tex t , but the text is consta n t in rel ation
to the reading . The text is always the same-and at each reading
it is different . Each read ing is a d a ted experien ce which d enies
history by virtue of the tex t and which by reason of this denial
forces i tself again withi n history . Variation and repeti tion : the
reading is an interpreta tion , a vari ation of the tex t , and in that
variation the tex t is realized , is repeate d -and absorbs the
variation. Finally, the reading is h istorical and , at the same time,
is the dissipation of history in an undated present . The date
of the reading m e l ts away ; the reading is a repetition (a creative
variation ) of the original a c t : the poem's composi tio n . The
reading returns us to another tim e , that of the poem . A time
that is not of calendars and clocks-a time which exists before
them .
The time of the poem is inside history , not outside i t . Tex t
and readings are inseparable, and in them history and a history ,
change and identity, are united without being dissolved .
I t is not a transcendence but a convergence. I t is time which
repeats i tself and is u nrepealab l e , which flows without flowing :
a time which turns back upon itself. The time of the reading
is here-and-now : a now which h appens at any momen t , and a
1 63
here which exists anywhere . The poem is history and i t i s that

something which rej ects history in the very i nstant of a ffirming
i t . Io read
non-poetic tex t is to understand i t , t o cap,ture
its meaning; to read a poetic tex t is to resusc!tat_ it, to re pre_

-
duce i t . This re-production unfolds i tself in history, b u t opens

out toward a present which is the abolition of history . The
-
poetry starting up in this second hal f of the century is n o t

really starting. N o r is i t returning to the poi nt o f departure. The
poetry beginning n ow , without beginning , is looking for the
i ntersection of times, the point of convergence . I t asserts that
poetry is the present, between the clu ttered past and the
uninhabited future. The re-production is a presentation. Pure
_
time : heartbeat of the presence in the m oment of its appear
ance/ disappearance.
1 64
Chil d ren of the M ire
Notes
I.
The criticism of time was only one of the ways to exorcise

history. The other was the caste system . Although the Portu
guese w ord casta translates fairly faithfully the term generally
used i n I ndia, jeti, Westerners tend to give it a meaning t inged
with historicism : implying not lineage or generation but
stratified class. The word class immediately links us with
history and change . From the p oin t of view of Western anthro
pologists and their Indian disciples, the phenomenon of caste
is but an extreme case of a universal phenomenon : the tendency
toward social stratification . This interpretation d issolves , spirits
away the unique quality of the caste concep t . For there is
somethi ng specific in the idea o f caste which is not found in
that of class. If we want to understand the underlying ideology
on which the reali ty of the castes is based , what this concep t
really means for a traditional Indian , the first thing we must do
is distinguish "caste " from "class . "
For us, society is a collection of classes, generally at w a r with
each other and all in motion. Human society forms a dynamic
whole which is continually changing ; this ceaseless movement
is what distinguishes it from the social struc tures of animals,
1 65
Notes
which are static. I n human society something appears which

does not ex ist in na ture : cul ture . And culture is history . The
Indian conception is the contrary . There is no opposition
between nature and society, the first is the arche type of the
second . For an Indian the "castes" - there are more than three
thousand of them-are not "classes" b u t species. The word
"jeti" li terally means species. The Indian sees human society in
the immovable mirror of Nature and her u nchanging species.
Far from being an exception , the human world prolongs and
confirms the na tural order. We , u sed to seeing society as a
process, think of the caste system as a scandalous exception ,
an historical anomal y . And so , the opp osi tion be tween "caste "
and "class" hides an even deeper con trast : between history and
nature, change and stabili ty . If men from other civilizations
could m ediate in the debate, they would probably say tha t the
true exception is not the caste system-al though some migh t
recognize i t a s a more o r less iniquitous ex aggeration -nor the
idea which inspires i t , but our own view , which sees change
as inherent in society and regard s it as almost always benefi cent.
The u nique and bizarre th ing is the point of view which over
values change , converts it into a philosophy, and then makes
this philosophy the fou ndation of society . A primitive would
consider such an outlook imprudent at the very least. I t all bu t
opens the door to original chaos.
2.
After wri ting these pages 1 received an interesting study
wri tten by Edmund L . King and entitled "What is Spanish
1 66
Childre n of the Mire
Romanticism ? " (Studies in R oman ticism , Vol .
2 , no .
1 , Au tumn
1 962). The first part of Professor King's analysis coincides with
my own : the feebleness of the Romantic reaction is explained

by the poverty of Span ish Neocl assicism and by the absence of
an authentic Enlightenmen t in Spain . However, I do not share
the point of view expounded in the second half of his study ,
where he states tha t Krausismo was the real Spanish Romanti
cism , "infusing a generation of young Spaniard s with genuinely
Romantic concerns that wou ld inevi tably be expressed in the
arts and le tters of what we call the Genera tion of
1 898 ." My
disagreements can be summarized in two arguments.

First, Krausismo was a philosophy , not a poe tic movement.
There are n o "Krausist" poets, although some poets at the
beginning of the century (Jimenez among others) were more or
less affected by the ideas of Krause 's Spanish disciples.
Second , Professor King's explanation is self-con tradictory ,
for he denies (or forgets) in the second part o f his study what he
affinns in the first . First he maintains tha t Spanish Romanticism
failed because it lacked historical authentici ty (although the
Spanish Romantics were individually sincere ) ; it consti tuted a
reaction against something which Spain had not had , namely ,
the Enlightenment and i ts ra tionalistic cri ticism of traditional
beliefs and institutions. In his second part he states tha t the
Krausismo of the second half of the nineteenth century was
the Romanticism Spain had lacked in the first half. \Veil now,
if Romanticism is a reaction to and against the Enlightenment .
Krausismo must be also a rea ction -against what? He d oes not
tell us. To clari fy my point : if Krausismo is the Spanish equiva
lent of Romanticism , wha t is th e Spanish equivalent of the
Enligh tenment? The problem is solved if, instead of think ing
1 67
Notes
of the Spanish tradi tion as one (th e peninsular) , we recognize

tha t i t is dual (the Spanish and the Spanish America n ) . The
reply to this apparen t enigma lies in two words and in their
contradi ctory relationship in the con tex t of Spanish America :
Positivism and modernism o . Positivism is the Spanish American
equivalent of the European Enligh tenmen t, and modernismo
was our Romantic reaction. Of course it was not the original
Romanticism of
1 800, bu t its metaphor. The terms of this
metaphor are the same as those of the Romantics and Sym

bolists : analogy and irony . Spanish p oe ts of that era replied
to the S panish American stimulus in the same way that the
Spanish Americans had replied to the stimulus of French
poetry . Creative replies, sometimes retorts : transmutations.
The links of the chain : Spanish American Positivism
Spanish American modernism a Spanish poetry .
Why was the influence o f Spanish American poetry so fruitful?
Wel l , because , thanks to the me tric and verbal ren ovations of
the modern istas, it became p ossible for the first time to say
things in Castilian which until then had been said only in
English , F rench , and Germ an . Unamuno guessed this, but only
to disprove i t . In a letter to Ruben Daria he said : "What I see ,
i n you specifically, i s a writer who wants to say , in Castilian ,
things which have never even been though t in Castil ian, and
which even now cannot be though t in our language . " Unamuno
regarded the modern istas as Frenchified savages who worshipped
brilliant and empty forms. B u t there are no empty or insignifi
cant forms . Poe tic forms say , and the modernista forms said
something hitherto unsaid in Castilian : analogy and irony . I
repeat : Spanish American modernismo was the version , the
1 68
me taphor, of European Romanticism and Symbolism . From

this version onward , Spanish poets explored other poe tic
world s for them selves.
How can one explain the minimal penetra tion of the ideas of
the Enlightenment into Spain? I n L iberales y R omdn ticos ,
Llorens quotes some disheartened words of Alcala Galian o :
"Without any d oubt this renovation o f poetry and criticism
(Roman ticism ) was extremely salu tory ; but its weakness in
Spain was the same as that of the doctrines erroneously called
Classical , namely, that i t was a foreign plant brought to our
soil and transplanted in an unin telligen t way which resul ted in
forced fru its, poor in quality , d ull in color, and weak in strength . "
Alcala G aliano's explanat ion i s not convin cing : six teenthcen tury I talian poetry was no less strange a plant than N eoclassi
cism in the eigh teenth century and R omanticism in the nine
teen th , b u t its fruits were neither meager nor poor. Llorens
quotes the opinion of one of the ex tremists or J acobins exiled
in Lond on , who concealed his identi ty under the pseudonym
Fil6pa tro . In
1 82 5 , Filopatro wro te in / Espaiol constitucional,
which was considered the spokesman of the exiled extremists :

"Spaniards began to enlighten t hemselves in secret , eagerly
absorbing the choicest works of philosophy and public law
of which until then they had not had the least idea . . . H ow
ever, this same enligh tenmen t (Locke, Voltaire , Montesquieu ,
Rousseau , and company . . . ), being undigested , and totally
ou t of con tact with empirical reality , came to produ ce fruits
more bitter even than ignorance itself. " Filopatro was righ t :
i n ord er for the Enlightenment t o have fertilized Spain i t would
have needed to insert ideas (criticism ) into life (praxis). S pain
1 69
Notes
lacked a class, a national bourgeoisie , capable of criticizing

traditional socie ty and modernizing the country .
3.
E ighteen th-century rel igious criticism embraced heaven and
earth ; it was criticism of Christian divinity , i ts saints and devils,
criticism of i ts churches and priests. It criticized religion on the
one hand as revealed truth and immutable scripture ; on the
other as a man-made insti tution. Phi losophy u nd ermined the
conceptual edifice of theology , and attacked the church's
claims to hegemony and universality . I t destroyed the image
of the Christian god , not the idea of God. Philosophy was anti
Christian and deist ; God ceased to be a person and was con
verted into a concept . Confron ted by the spectacle of the
un iverse , the philosophers waxed enthusiasti c : they believed
they had discovered in i ts movements a secret order, a hidden
inspiration which could only be d ivine . Double perfection :
the un iverse was moved by a ra tional design which was a lso a
moral design . Natural rel igion replaced revealed religion , and
the plzilosoplzes replace d the Council of Cardinals. The idea
of order and the idea of causality were visible manifestations,
rational and sensible proofs of the existence of a divine plan ;
the movemen t of the universe was insp ired by an end and a
purpose : God is invisibl e , not his works or the intention which
animates them . The ma terialists and atheists with very few
excep tions shared this belief: the un iverse is an intelligen t order
endowed with an evident purpose , even though we do not
kn ow its final outcom e .
1 70
David Hume was the first to criticize the cri tics of religion ;
his cri ticism remains unsurpassed and is applicable to many
contemporary beliefs . I n his Dialogues Concerning Na tural
R eligion he showed tha t the philosophers had p laced upon the

empty a ltars of Christianity o ther divinities no less chimerical ,
deified concepts such as universal harm ony and the purpose
animating this harmony . The idea of design or purpose is the
root of the religious ide a ; wherever it appears, not excluding
atheistic and materialistic philosophies, religion also appears,
and sooner or later a church, a myth , and an inquisitio n . The
content of each religion may vary - the number of god s and
ideas men have worshiped and d o worship is almost infin ite
but behind all these beliefs we find the same pattern : a p urpose
is attribu ted to the universe , and immediately thereafter this
purpose is identified with goodness, freedom , holiness e ternity ,
or some similar idea.
It is not difficult to deduce from Hume's cri ticism the follow
ing consequence : the origin of the idea of history as progress is
religious and the idea itself is para-religious. It is the result of a
double and defective inference : the belief that Nature has a
design , and the identifi cation of this design with the forward
motion of history and society. The same line of reasoning
appears in all religions and pseudo-rel igions. In its first phase,
as the real or apparent regularity of the natural processes is
observed , the idea of finality is in troduced into the order of
Nature ; immediately thereafter social changes and disturbances
are attributed to the action of the same principle by which
Nature is animated . I f history really possesses a meaning, the
passage of time becomes providential, though the name of this
providence changes with the changes of the society and the
171
Notes
culture : sometimes it is called G od , other times evol ution , and

at others the dialectic of history . The imp ortance of the
calendar in ancient China (or in M esoamerica) is another con
sequence of the same idea : the m odel of historical time is
nature's tim e , heavenly tim e .
Religion is a n in terpre tation of the original condition of man ,
cast into a strange world toward which his first sensation is one
of aband onmen t , orphanhood , d e fenselessness . We can j udge
the meaning and value of religious interpretation in many ways.
For example, we can say , paradoxically , that it is an act of
unconscious hypocri sy , by m eans of which we deceive ourselves
before d eceiving our peers . Or we can say that it is a m eans of
knowing or, rather, of penetrating the o th er reality , that region
which we never see with our eyes open . We can also say tha t
perhaps it is no more than the manifestation of a tendency
inherent in human nature . I f this were so , we would have no
other recourse than to accep t the existence of a "religious
instinct . " Hume 's cri ticism is decisive b ecause , by showing that
inevitabl y we are d ealing with the same operation -whatever
the society, epoch , con ten t, and nature of the represen tations
and beliefs-he implicitly allows us to suspect that we are con
fronted by a mental structure common to all men . At the same
time, by emphasizing i ts unconscious nature , he points out tha t
it is the result of a psychic, to a certain extent instinctive , need .
Hume's criticism was to be completed a century and a half later
by Freud and Heidegger, but we still lack a complete descrip tion
of the "religious instinct. "
Whatever i ts origi n , religion i s p resent i n all societies : i n the
primitive and the great societies of antiquity , in the bosom of
1 72
peoples who bel ieve in magi c , and in the industrial societies

of today , among the worshipers of Mohammed and those who
swear b y Marx . In all places and epochs the "religious instin ct"
turns ideas into beliefs, and beliefs into rituals and myths. I t
would b e u n fair to forget that w e owe it the incarnation of
ideas in perceptible images. There is nothing lovelier than the
twelfth-century statue in the Ind ian province of Orissa repre
sen ting Prajna Paramita, the Budd hist Supreme Wisdom , central
me taphysical concept of the M ahayana Buddhists, as a nake d ,
bejeweled girl. Religi on's two faces: solitary experience of the
mystics and the brutalizing of the populace , spiri tual illumina
tion and rapacity of clerics, communal feast and burning
of heretics.
Hume's criticism can be applied to all philosophies and
ideologies which are nothing more than shamefaced religions,
without gods but with priests, holy books , councils, devotees,
executioners, heretics, and reprobates. Hume anticipated what
would follow : reason worshiped as a goddess, and the supreme
being of the philosophers converted into the 1 ehovah of pedantic
and bloodthirsty sects. Criticism of religion rep laced Christianity ,
and in its place men hastened to en throne a new deity : p olitics.
The "religious instinct" depended on the complicity of p hil os
ophy . The philosophers substit uted one belief for anothe r :
revealed religion for natural religion, grace for reason . Phi losophy
profa ned heaven but consecrated earth ; the consecration of
historic time was the consecration of change in its most intense
and immediate form : political acti on . Phi losophy ceased t o be
theory and descended to men . I ts incarnation was called revolu
tion . I f human history is the history of disparity and inequity ,
1 73
Notes
the redemp tion of history , the eucharist which changes i t in to

equality and freedom is revolution .
The mythical theme of original time is converted to the
revolutionary theme of fu ture society . From the end of the
eightee n th century and notably since the French Revolution ,
revolu tionary political philosophy confiscates one by one the
concepts, values, and images that tradi tionally belonged to
religions. This process of appropriation grows keener in the
twen tieth cen tury , the century of political religions as the
six teenth and seventeenth were the cen turies of religious wars.
For two hundred years we have l ived , first the Europeans and
then everyone , in the expectation of an even t which will have
for us the gravity and terrible fascina tion the Second Coming
of Christ had for the early Christian s : Revolution . This event ,
viewed with hope b y some and horror b y others, possesses,
as I have said , a double meaning : i t is the establishment o f a
new society and the restoration of the original society , before
the days of private property , the State, scripture, the idea of
God , slavery, and the oppression of women. An expression
of cri tical reason, the Revolu tion p laces i tsel f within historic
time ; it replaces the evil present w ith the just and liberated
future . This change is a return -to the time of the beginning,
to original innocence. Thus the Revolution is an idea and an
image , a concept which shares in the properties of m y th and
a myth which is founded on the authority of reason .
In former societies, rel igions had two exclusive functions :
to change time , and to change man . Calendar changes were
not revolutionary b u t religious. Change o f era, change of god :
the changes of the world were the changes of the other-worl d .
1 74
Revolts, uprisings , usurp tions, abdica tions, the advent of new

dynasties, social transformations, mutations of the property
system or the j u ridical structure , inventions, d iscoveries, wars,
conquests-all this vast and incoherent rumble of history with
its ceaseless viccisi tudes did not bring about any alteration of
the image of time and of the coun ting of years . I do not know
whether one singu lar fact has been noted or considered : for
the Mexican I ndians the Conquest w as a change of calendars.
A change of divinities, a change of religion . In the modern
world, revolu tion displaces religion and therefore the French
revolutionaries tried to change the calendar. According to
Marx 's well-known dictum, the mission of the philosopher
consists not so much in interpreting the world as in changing
i t ; this change implies the ad op tion of a new temporal archtype :
a change of Chri stian eternity for the fu ture of revolutions.
The religious function which consists of the creation and change
of the calendar is thu s transforme d into a revolutionary
function .
Something sim ilar happens with the o ther fu nction of reli
gions : changing man. Ceremonies of initiation and ri tes of
passage consist of a true transmutation of human nature . All
these rituals have one thing in common : the sacrament is the
symbolic bridge over which the neophy te passes from the
profane to the sacred worl d , from this shore to the other. A
crossing which is d eath and resurrection : a new man emerges
from the ri tual . Baptism changes us, gives us a name and makes
us other ; commu nion is also a transmutation, and the same is
true of the viaticum-a word more meaningful than most . The
central ritual i n all religions is that of entry into the community
1 75
Notes
of the faithfu l , and in every case this ritual implies a change of

nature . Con version expresses very clearly this mutation which
is also a return to the original community . Since the birth of
the mod ern era, and more insisten tly during the last fifty years,
ruling revolu tionaries have proclaimed that the u ltimate goal
of revolu tion is to change man : the conversion of the individual
and the community. A t times this claim h as taken on forms
which would have been grotesq ue had they not been atrocious,
as whe n , combining supersti tion toward technology and ideo
logical superstition , S talin was called "engineer of m en . "
Stalin 's example i s a terri fying one ; o thers stir u s deeply :
Saint-Just, Trotsky . Even if moved b y the Promethean nature
of their pretensions, I can only deplore their ingenui ty and
condemn their excess.
1 76
Sources and Cred its
21
August ine , The City of God.

Dante, Infern o, canto vi.
"The Travels of Mirza Abii TaJe b , " Sources of In dia n Trad ition
( New York , Columbia University Press, 1 9 5 8) .
Dante, Infern o, canto x.
34
The Everlasting Gospel, The Co mple te Poe try of Willia m Bla k e
1 4- 1 5
16
17
( New Y ork , Rando m House , 1 9 4 1 ).

39
Friedrich Holderlin, Po ems a nd Fragmen ts, Michael Ha mburger
trans. ( London, Routledge a nd Kegan Paul , 1 9 66 ) ; Oeu vres
( Pa ris, Biblio theque de la PltHade, 1 9 6 7 ) .
4 1 , 44 L e t t ers of Pe rcy Byssll e Slze lley , e d . F . L . Jones ( 2 vols . , Oxford ,
1 9 64). Word swort h , The Prelude ( 1 8 0 5 text), book x , 5 1 5 -5 1 6 ,
5 3 5 -5 3 6 .
46-47
49
53
Jean Paul Richt er, Sie ben ki.is, 1 7 9 6 .

Nerval, Oe uvres ( Pa ris , Bibliotheque de l a Pleid e , 1 9 5 2 ) .
Colerid ge , "Poe t ry and Religion ," Th e Portable Coleridge, ed .
I . A . Richards ( New York , Viking, 1 9 5 8 ) . Navalis, Frag men ts.
Blake, "Proverb s of Hell ," The Marriage of Heaven and He ll
( 1 790).
54
56
58
62
68
1 77
"The Voice o f the Devil , " ib id.

"All Religions Are One . "
S chlegal, Gespri.ich iiber die Poesie ed . H . Eichmer ( 1 96 8) .
Bla ke , "O n Ho mer's Poetry and o n Virgil" ( 1 8 2 0 ) .
Charles Fourier, Tlu fo rie des q uatre m ou vemen ts e t des des tin ees
generales ( Pa ris, Anthropos, 1 9 6 7 ) .
S ources a n d Credit s
Charles Baud elaire , L 'art ro man tiq ue, Oeu vres ( Paris, Bibliotheq ue
de la Pleiade, 1 9 4 1 ).
Baud elaire, "Correspondances ," transla ted by Carlyle F . M aci ntyre ,
74
Fren ch Sy m b olist Poe try (B erk eley, University of California
Press, I 96 1 ).
75
Canto 8 3 , xxxiii, 1 1 . 86-9 1 ; t ranslated by Doro thy Sayers,
Th e Co medy of Dan te A ligh ieri th e Floren tine ( 3 vols. , Ham
mondsworth , Penguin , 1 9 6 5 -1 9 7 2 ).
7 6-7 7 Mallarme, Oe uvres com pletes ( Paris, Bib liotheque d e la Pleiade,
1 9 5 6 ), and Corresp ondan ce ( 2 vols. , Paris, Gallimard , 1 9 5 9 ).
7 9-80 Vice nte Llorens , Lib erales y romdn ticos (2nd ed . , Madrid , 1 9 68 ) ,
a nd Juan Goytisol o , A n tologza de Jose Maria Bla n co Wh ite in
Libre ( no. 2, Paris, 1 9 7 1 ).
84-85 Unlike other Spanish Am eri can writers, the Argentinians sought
inspiration directly fro m French mod els. Although its romanticism
w as also external and declam at ory , the Argent inian mo vemen t
a lit t le lat er, and in the guise of regionalism , prod uced the only
great Spanish American poem of t his perio d , Mar tzlz Fierro , b y
J ose Hernandez ( I 8 34- 1 8 6 6 ) .
B audelaire , " La pein ture de l a vie mod ern e" ( 1 8 63 ) , Curiosites
90
7 0-7 1
Estlz etiques.
Paz, Til e Oth er Mexico : Cri tiq u e of tlz e Py ra m id, trans. Lysander
Kemp ( Ne w York , Grove , 1 9 7 2 ).
L ectures from 1 940-1 94 1 . L iterary Curren ts in Hispan ic A me rica
93
( Ca mbridge, Mass. , Harvard University Press, 1 94 5 ).
94-9 5 B reto n , A rcane I 7 e11te d 'ajours (Paris, Sagittaire , 1 9 47 ).
95
Dario, Poema X I I I , Otros po e m as, part 3 of Can tos de vida y
espera n za ( 1 9 0 5 ).
96-98 Lugo nes, L os crepusculos del jardz'n ( Buenos Aires, 1 90 5 ) ; Lo pez
Velarde, Ob ras (M exico, F.C. E., 1 9 7 1 ); M achado, Poesias ca m
p/etas (B uenos Aires, 1 9 5 9 ) ; Ji menez, Tercera a n to logia poe tica
( Madrid, 1 9 5 7 ).
99
Fernando Pessoa , "Maritime Ode," translated and used by per
mission of Edwin Honig.
1 00
Jose Mart 1', "Two Countries" ; t ranslated and used by permission of
William Ferguson.
92
1 78
Trotsky, vol. I , Litera tura y re vo/ucic m , and vol. 2 , Otros escritos

sabre Ia litera tura y el arte ( Paris , 1 96 9 ). The first two q uotations
a re from vol. 2; the rest fro m vol. 1 .
1 0- 1 1 2 Marcel Du champ, Eta n t Don nes: 1 . La Ch u te d 'Eau ; 2. Le Gaz
d 'Eclairage ( 1 946- 1 96 6 ), Assemblage , Philadelphia Museum of
Fine Arts.
Arthur Rimbaud , " Alchimie du verbe," Un e Saison e n Enfer
1 13
( 1 8 7 3 ) ; " Lettre du voyant" (let ter to Paul Demeny, M a y 1 5 ,
1 8 7 1 ) , Oeuvres com pletes, e d . Roland d e Reneville et J ules
Mouquet (Paris, Biblio theque de Ia Pleiade, 1 94 6 ).
1 3- 1 1 4 Mallarme, Un co up de des (Paris, 1 89 7 ) .
B audelair e , Mon coeur m is a nu ( 1 8 6 2- 1 864).
I 17
H ugh Ken ner , The Po und Era ( Berkeley , University of California ,
1 19
1 97 1 ) ; the interview ( with D . C . B ridson ) appeared in Ne w
Dire ctio ns in 1 9 6 1 .
T. S . Eliot , "The M etaphysical Poets" ( 1 92 1 ), in Selected Essays
121
( New Yor k , Harco urt , Brace , 1 93 2 ).
1 27
Pound, Ca n to 8 0 ; Pisa n Can t os, 7 4 . The A B C of R eading ( New
Yor k , New Dire ctions ) .
1 29
lJt omas Ernest Hulm e, " Ro manticism a n d Classicism," Specula
tions: Essays on Hu manism a n d th e Philosophy o f A rt ( London ,
Rou tledge and Kegan Paul, 1 92 4 ) .
1 32
Eliot , " Dante" ( 1 9 2 9 ) , i n Se lec ted Essays.
Paz , " Horas situadas d e Jorge Guillen," Pu ertas a/ campo ( 2 n d ed. ,
1 43
Barcelona , Seix Barra) , 1 9 7 2 ).
1 49
A lterna ting Curren t, trans. Helen D . Lan e (New Yor k , Vik ing,
1 97 3 ) ; Conju n c tions and Disju n ctions, trans. Helen D. Lane ( New
Y or k , Viking, 1 9 7 3 ) ; Rit a G uibert Se ven Voices ( New York,
Kno pf, 1 9 7 3 ) .
Daniel Bell , "The Post-I nd ust rial Society : The Evolution o f an I d e
1 53
Survey, numbers 7 8 a n d 7 9 , 1 97 1 .
1 54
I n A lternating Curren t I d es cribed the differences between revolu
t ion , revol t , and re bellion . The classic exam ple of "revolution" is
still the French Revolution, and I do not know whether it is
legitimate to apply this w ord to the changes whi c h have taken
place in R ussia, China, and else where , profound and de cisive
1 03
1 79
Sources a nd Credits
though they may have been. I use the word "revolt" to re fer to
t he uprisings and liberation move ments of the Third World and
Latin America ( the lat ter , strictly speaking, does not belong to t he
Third World) , and "rebellion " for the protest movements of
e thnic minorities, women's liberat ion , stud ent and other g roups,
in industrialized so cieties .
1 80
Index
ABC of Reading ( Po u nd ), 1 27
Abstra ctio nism, 1 3 1 , 1 3 2

Aen eid, Th e, 6 2
i Aguila o sol? (Paz) , 1 4 6
A Ia recherche du temps perdu (Pr oust),
161
Albert i , Rafael, 1 42 , 1 4 4
A/cools ( A po llinaire ) , 1 1 9
Aleixa ndre , Vicente, 1 4 4
Alo nso , Damaso, 1 4 3
A/razor ( H uidobro), 1 4 0
Alt ematiltg Current, 1 7 9
Ancien t Man'ner, 17ze (Coleridge), 60

Antologia poetica en honor de Gongora
( D iego) , 1 4 3
Apollinair e , Guillau me, 1 1 8 - 1 20, 1 3 9 ,
1 40
Aragon , Louis, 1 20, 1 3 3
Arcane 1 7 ( Breto n), 95 , 1 3 6
Are nas, Braulio, 1 44
Arp , Hans, 1 1 9
Art roman tique, L ' ( Baudelaire), 1
Ashberry, John, 1 44
Augustine , Saint , 1 4 , 1 5 , 2 8 , 3 6
Aurelia (N erval), 6 5
Ava nt-garde, 8 8 , 1 02 , 1 0 3 , 1 1 0 , 1 1 5 ,
1 1 6 , 1 1 8 , 1 1 9 , 1 3 1 -1 3 5 , 1 39 , 1 40,
1 4 3, 1 4 7 , 1 4 8 , 1 5 9 , 1 6 1
Balzac, Honore d e , 5 5 , 6 9
Ball , Hugo , 1 1 9
Bataille , Georges , 34
181
I ndex
Baudelair e , Charles, 1 , 3 1 , 5 5 , 6 5 , 66,

7 2-7 5 , 8 2, 90-9 2 , 9 6 , 1 0 9 , 1 1 6 , 1 1 7 ,
1 2 8, 1 6 2
Becquer , Gustavo Adolfo , 8 0 , 8 1
Bello, And res, 9 3
Ben n , Got t fried, 1 2 1
Biographia Literaria (Coleridge ) , 6 0
Bishop, Elizabet h , 1 4 7
Blake, Willia m , 3 4 , 3 6 , 3 9 , 44, 5 3-5 8 ,
6 0 , 6 2, 8 1 , 94 , 1 07
Blanco Wh ite, Jose Maria, 7 9, 8 0, 1 22
Blavatsky , Elena , 94
Blo k , Aleksan dr, 1 05
Boh me , Jakob , 6 7
Book of Exodus, T11 e, 1 28
Borges, Jorge Luis, 1 3 8 , 1 4 0, 1 4 2, 1 46
Boscan , Juan, 79
Brahman, 1 2, 1 3 , 1 6
Bra ques, Georges, 1 1 5
Breton , Andre, 4 , 7 , 6 8 , 94 , 1 0 3 , 1 20 ,
1 3 2 , 1 3 3 , 1 36
Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors,

Even , 17ze ( Duchamp) , 1 1 1 , 1 1 2
Bulletin of the R ussian Opposition, 1 04
Bunue1, Luis, 1 44
Byr on, Lo rd, 7 8
Cabral d e Melo , J oao , 1 4 7

Calder o n de Ia Barca , Pedro , 6 1 , 6 2,
8 3 , 1 34
Camus, Alber t , 1 4 8
Canto general (Neruda), 1 4 6
Can tos (Po und), 1 1 9 , 1 25 , 1 26 , 1 2 8,

1 3 5 , 1 36
Can tos de vida y esperanza ( Dado ) , 9 6

Carrera Andrade , Jorge, 1 4 2
Castro , Ro salia, 8 0, 8 1
Cavalcanti , Guid o , 1 28
Cazalis, Henri, 76
Cendrars, Blaise, 1 1 8
Cer nuda, Luis, 1 3 3 , 1 45
Cervan tes, Miguel de, 2 1 , 3 3
01amps magn etiques, Les ( Breton and
Soupaul t), 1 20
01ateaubr ian d , Vico mte Franois Rene
de, 6 5 , 1 1 6
Olaucer, Geoffrey, 1 27
01imeres, Les (Nerval), 67
Olirico , Giorgio de, 1 1 5
Olr ist , 1 3- 1 5 , 44-5 1 , 5 3 , 5 4 , 1 28 , 1 7 4
"Christ on the Mount of Olives,"
( Nerval ) , 49
Ciacco , 1 6
Oassicism, 1 3 0- 1 3 1
Oaudel , Paul, 1 1 8
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 3 6 , 40, 44,
5 2 , 5 3 , 5 7 , 60
Co mte, Augu ste, 87
Confucius, 1 24, 1 3 3
Constant, Abbe. See Levi, Eliphas
Construct ivism, 1 3 1
Corbiere, Tristan, 6 6 , 1 1 9, 1 2 1
Correspondances (Baud elaire) , 74
Costumbres erra1l tes o Ia redondez de Ia

tierra ( M olina), 1 4 6
Coup d e des, Un, 6 6 , 6 7 , 1 3 6
Cou stine, Marquis o f, 6
Cravan , Arthur, 1 1 8
Creacionismo , 1 3 9 , 1 4 1
Cruz, San Juan d e Ia, 1 0 1
Cruz, Sor Juana 1 nes de la , 8 3 , 1 3 8
Cub ism , 1 1 5 , 1 3 1 , 1 3 2
cummings , e.e., 1 20 , 1 3 5 , 1 40
Dada, 1 1 9 , 1 2 0, 1 3 1 - 1 3 3
Dati, Salvador , 1 44
1 82
Children of t he Mire
Dante Alighieri, 1 6 , 2 1 -2 3 , 27 , 5 2 , 6 2 ,
6 3 , 7 5 , 7 6 , 1 24 , 1 2 8, 1 30 , 1 34, 1 4 1
Danton, Georges Jacques, 8 7
Dario, Ruben, 9 0 , 9 2 , 9 5 -9 7 , 1 1 8 , 1 4 1 ,
1 4 2, 1 6 8
Debou t , Simo ne, 69
Delacr oix, Eugen e, 4 , 8 2 , 1 3 1
Deshumanizacion del arte, La ( Or t ega y
Gasset), 1 4 3
Destrnccion o el amor, La ( Aleixandre),
1 44
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,

( Hume), 1 7 1
Diego, Gerard o, 1 4 3
Divine Comedy, The (Dante), 1 28
Do nne , John, 1 2 1 , 1 27
Dostoevski, Fyodor, 48
Dream ( Rich t er), 46-48
Du champ, Marcel, 3, 1 1 0 , 1 1 2 , 1 1 4 ,
1 36 , 1 5 9
Dumezil , Georges, 7
Ecuatorial (Huidobro ), 1 39
Ediso n , Thomas A . , 9 2
Ehrenburg, llya, 1 1 8
Elio t, T. S . , 5 5 , 6 6 , 9 9 , 1 1 9 - 1 2 1 ,
1 2 3- 1 25 , 1 2 7- 1 30 , 1 3 2- 1 36 , 1 4 0,
1 42
Esenin , Sergei, I 0 3- 1 04
Espanol constitucioual, El, 1 69
"Esthetique d u m al , " (S tevens) , 1 3 5
Estrada Cabrera, Ma nuel, 9 2
Europe and Christianity, 1 2 9
Expressionism , 1 2 1 , 1 3 1
Fabula de Equis y Zeda ( Diego ), 1 4 3
Far inata d egli Uberti, 2 1 , 3 2

Faust, 6 2
Fauves, Les, 1 3 1 , 1 3 2
Ferguson, Willia m , 1 00
fervor de Bue11os A ires ( Bo rges), 1 42
Fijeza, LA ( Lezama Lima), 1 46
Fil o patro , 1 6 9
Fleurs du mal, Les ( Baudelaire ) , 1 2 8
Fourier, Charles, 6 8 , 6 9 , 7 5 , 9 4 , 1 1 3,
1 27
Fragments (Navalis), 60
Freu d , Sigmund , 6 9 , 1 7 2
Fu t urism, 1 05 , 1 06 , 1 2 1 , 1 3 1
Galiano Alcala, Antonio , 1 6 9
Garcia Lo r ca , Federico , 1 1 5 , 1 1 8,
1 4 2- 1 44 .
Garcilaso d e I a Vega , 7 9 , 9 3 , 1 0 1 , 1 2 2
Gau tama, 1 3
Gau tier , Theophile, 6 6 , 1 06 , 1 1 9
Ginsberg, Allen, 1 4 7
Girond o , Oliverio , 1 4 0
Girri. Alberto, 1 4 6
Glorious Lie, The. See Glory of til e
Lie, The
Glory of the L ie, 171 e ( M allarme), 7 6
Goethe, J o hann, 5 5 , 95
GO mez-Correa , Enrique, 1 4 4
Gongora, Luis d e Argot e , y , 3 , 8 1 , 1 0 1 ,
1 1 3 , 1 2 2 , 1 3 2, 1 4 2 , 1 4 3
Goy tisolo , Juan, 1 7 8
Gorost iza, J ose, 1 46
Graci<!n, Baltasar , 2, 3
Guillen , Jorge , 1 39 , 1 4 3
Hegel , Georg , 26 , 27 , 1 07
Heidegger, Marti n , 1 7 2
Heine, Heinrich, 8 1 , 1 2 9
Hemingway, Ernest , 2 1
Henriquez Urena , Pedro , 9 3
Heraclitus, 1 3 0
Heraldos negros, Los (Vallejo), 1 4 1
Herder , J o hann, 4 , 5 1 , 6 2, 99
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 8 1
Holderlin, Friedrich , 39 , 44 , 5 5 , 6 0 ,
62, 1 61
Ho mer , 6 2
Honig, Edwin , 9 9
Huelsenbeck , Richard, 1 1 9
Hugo, Victor, 44 , 65 , 6 6 , 7 8 , 9 4 , 1 1 7
Hu idobro , Vicen te, 1 1 8- 1 2 0, 1 3 7 ,
1 3 9- 1 4 1 , 1 4 3 , 1 44 , 1 6 0
1 83
Index
Hulme, T. E. , 1 2 9-1 3 1
Hume, David , 57 , 1 0 8, 1 5 7 , 1 7 1 - 1 7 3
Hymns to tile Night (Navalis), 6 0
Hyperion ( Holderlin) , 3 9
lfigenia cruel ( Reyes), 1 3 9

Imagism , I I 5 , 1 1 9
I mpressionism , 1 I 5
Inferno ( Dan te), 1 2 8

lngres, Jean, 1 3 1
Jacob, Ma x , 1 1 9
Jakobson, Roma n , 6 7 , 1 6 3
Jean Paul. See Richter, J ean Pa ul
Jefferson, Thomas, 8 7
J imenez, J uan Ramon, 8 0 , 9 0 , 9 8 , 1 37 ,
1 3 9, 1 4 2 , 1 6 7
Johnso n , J ack, 1 I 8
Joyce , James, 3 2 , 4 8 , 1 0 9 , 1 1 2 , 1 1 4 ,
1 59
J uana Ines de Ia Cruz , Sor. See Cruz, Sor
J uana lnes de Ia
J uarroz, Roberto, 1 46
Julio Jurenito , 1 1 8
Kandinsky , Wassily, 1 3 2
Ka n t , Immanuel, 2 7 , 5 2 , 8 2 , 1 29
Khlebnikov , Velemir , 1 1 8
Khrushchev, 1 45
King, Edmund L . , 1 6 6 , 1 6 7
Kora in Hell: Jmprotisations (Williams),
1 1 9 , 1 20
Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich, 8 7 , 90,
1 67
Kubla Khan (Coleridge), 60
Lafargue, Jules, 6 6 , 9 6 , 1 1 9-1 2 1
Lam, Wifredo , 1 44
Lamartine, Alpho nse , 6 6
Large Glass, The. See Bride Stripped
Bare by her Bachelors, Even, 171 e
Lana, Mariano Jose de, 7 8

Lau treamont , co mte d e , 1 3 1
Lawren ce, D. H. , 34
Leib nitz, Gottfried, 6 8
Len in, 1 04 , 1 05
Levi, Eliphas, 94
Levin, Harry , 1 20
Lezama Lima , Jose, 1 46
Lib erales y ronuinticos ( Llorens), 1 6 9
Lib ertad bajo palabra (Paz) , 1 4 6
Li Po , 8 1
Lloren s, Vicente, 1 6 9
Locke, John, 5 4 , 1 6 9
LOpez Velarde, Ramon, 6 6 , 97 , 9 8 ,
1 2 1 , 1 39
Louis Lam bert (Balzac) , 6 9
Lowell, Robert, 1 47
Lucinda ( F . S chlegel), 4 0
Lugones, Leo polda, 6 6 , 95 -97 , 1 3 9,
141
Lull, Raimundo, 1 5
Lunario sentimen tal ( Lugo nes) , 96
Mo der n ism , 8 8 , 1 1 0 , 1 2 3 , 1 29 , 1 3 5 ,
1 40
Modern ismo, 88-90 , 9 2 , 95 -9 9 , 1 35 ,
1 4 2, 1 6 8
Mohammed, 1 7 3
Molina , Enrique, 1 4 6
Molinari, Ricard o , 1 4 5
Molotov, 1 45
Mondrian, Pie t , 1 3 2
Montale, Eugenio , 1 2 1
Mo n tesquieu, Baron de, 1 6 9
Moro, Cesar, 1 44
Muerte sin fin (Gorostiza), 1 46
Musicien de Saint-Merry , Le ( A pollinaire) , 1 20
Musse t , Alfred de, 66
Mussolini, Benito , 1 2 5 , 1 3 3
Ma chado, Antonio , 9 0 , 9 8 , 1 3 9
Madame Bovary ( Aaubert ) , 1 6 2
Malatesta, Alberto, 1 3 3
Mallarme, Stephane, 3 2 , 48 , 5 5 , 6 6 , 7 6 ,
7 7 , 80, 8 1 , 1 1 2-1 1 4, 1 1 7 , 1 36, 1 3 7 ,
161, 162
Mandelsta m , Osi p , 4 3
Mandragora, 1 44
Manifestes (Breto n), 1 4 9
Mao Tse Tung, 1 45
Marinetti, Filippo , 1 1 8
"Maritime Ode" (Pessoa), 9 9
Marti J ose, 9 1 , 9 9 , 1 1 8
Martin Fierro ( Hermindez), 1 7 8
Ma r tinson, Harry , 1 0 7
Marx , Kar l , 6 8 , 1 05 , 1 07 , 1 26 , 1 5 1 ,
1 5 2, 1 5 7 , 1 7 3, 1 75
Mat t a Ech aurren, Rober to, 1 44
Maurras, Charles, 1 29-1 3 1
Mayakovsky , Vlad imir, 4 3 , 1 04-1 0 7
Me/moth reconcilie ( Balzac), 6 9
Mephistopheles, 6 2
Michaux, Henri, 1 1 0
Mil to n , Joh n , 5 2
Miro , Joan , 1 44
Mirza Abu Taleb, Khan , 1 7
Napoleon Bonaparte, 3 9 , 4 1 , 1 1 0
Nat uralism , 1 1 5
Neruda, Pablo , 1 3 3 , 1 4 4 , 1 4 6
Nerval , Gerard de, 44, 4 9 , 5 5 , 6 5 , 6 6 ,
84 , 1 07
Nervo, Amad o , 95
Netzahualcoy otl, Prince, 9 2
Newton, I saac, 1 7 , 5 4 , 6 8
Niet szche, Friedrich, 2 7 , 44 , 4 8 , 4 9 ,
54, 6 2
Nocturnos (Villaurru tia) , 1 44
Nodier , Charles, 6 5 , 66
Nord-Sud, 1 1 9
"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction "
( Stevens), 1 35
1 84
Children of t he Mire
Naked Year, The (Pilniak), 1 05
Nou veau monde amoureux, Le
(Fourier) , 6 9
Navalis, 3 6 , 4 0 , 4 4 , 5 3 , 5 7 , 6 0 , 1 07 ,
1 1 2, 1 29
"Oda a Walt Whi t man" ( Lorca ) , 1 44
Odyssey, 1 28 , 1 6 1 , 1 62
O'Hara, Frank , 1 44
Olson, Charles, 1 4 7
On Germany ( Stael ) , 4 8 , 1 29
"Only One, The" (Hold erlin), 44
Oppen, George, 1 4 2
Ort ega y Gasset, Jose, 1 4 3
Pa n t isocra cy, 40
Parmenides, 1 30
Parnassianism , 88
Parra, Nicanor, 1 46
Pas t ernak, Boris, 4 3
Peau de chagri11, La ( Balzac ) , 6 9
Pellicer , Carlos, 1 42
Per e t , Benjamin, 1 45
Pessoa, Fer na ndo , 4 9 , 5 5 , 9 4 , 9 9 , 1 1 8 ,
1 2 1 , 147
Petrarch, Francesco , 7 9
Picabia , Francis, 1 1 8 , 1 44
Picasso , Pablo , 1 1 5 , 1 1 6
Pilniak , Boris, 1 0 5 , 1 07
Pla to, 1 5
Poe , Edgar Allan , 1 1 6 , 1 1 7
Poemas articos ( Huidobro}, 1 39
Poeta en Nue1a York ( Lorca), 1 44
Post moder nismo , 96 , 9 8 , 1 3 8
Pou nd , Ezra. 4, 6 6 , 1 1 5 , 1 1 9, 1 20 ,
1 2 3- 1 30 , 1 3 2- 1 3 8 , 1 4 0
Prajna Para mita, 1 7 3
Pra 1da, 1 04
Prelude, Th e (Wordswor t h ) , 4 1 , 1 3 5
Proper t ius, 1 4 2
Purgatorio ( Dante), 1 28
Quetzalcoa t l , 1 2 , 45
Quevedo, Francisco de, 8 1 , 1 0 1
Racine , Jea n , 6 2 , 1 3 0 , 1 3 1 , 1 6 2
Reed , Joh n , 6
Renga, 1 6 0
Residencia en Ia tierra ( Neru da ) , 1 44
Restif de Ia Breto nne, N icolas, 6 8
Rever d y , Pierre, 1 1 9 , 1 20 , 1 39 , 1 4 3
Reyes , Alfonso, 1 39
Ricardo , David, 1 07 , 1 26
Richelieu, Cardinal, 3 8
Richter , Jean Paul, 3 6 , 4 6 , 4 8 , 4 9 , 5 7 ,
84
Ri1ke, Rainer Maria, 5 5 , 1 2 1
1 85
I ndex
Rimbaud, Ar t hur, 54, 66, 8 0, 9 1 , 94,

1 07 , 1 1 3 , 1 5 9
Rivera, Diego , 1 1 8
Robespier re, .Max imilie n, 4 1 , 8 2 , I 29
Rojas, Gonzalo , 1 44
Ro manticism, 3, 3 5 , 3 8 , 3 9 , 5 3 , 5 5 ,
5 8 , 5 9 , 6 1 -6 3 , 6 6 , 6 7 , 7 8 -8 1 , 8 4 , 8 8 ,
9 3 , 1 02 , 1 0 3 , 1 1 5 , 1 1 6 , 1 20 , 1 2 2 ,
1 28-1 3 2 , 1 34, 1 35 , 1 5 9, 1 6 7 - 1 6 9 .
Rosenberg , Haro ld, 2
Rousseau , Jea n Jacq ues, 3 3 , 3 5 , 3 6 ,
3 9 , 4 4 , 5 1 , 54, 6 5 , 1 6 9
Russell, Bertrand, 34
Sab ines, J a ime, 1 4 6
Sade, Marquis de , 34 , 1 3 1
Saint-J ust , Antoine, 1 7 6
Saint-Martin, Louis Clau de de, 6 7
Salina s , Pedro , 1 4 3
Sarmiento, Domingo Faust ino, 7 9 , 86
Satan, 5 4
Schlegel, August, 6 2
Schlegel, Frederick , 7 , 4 0 , 5 8
Season in Hell, A (R imbau d } , 1 1 3
Seneca , 1 4
Seraphita ( Ba lzac), 6 9
Sermones y moradas ( Alber ti}, 1 44
Shakespeare, William , 2 1 , 4 6, 1 27 ,
1 30 , 1 3 1
Shelley , Percy Bysshe, 4 1 , 4 4
Smith, Ad a m , 1 0 7 . 1 26
Soledades (Gongora ) , 9 8 , 1 1 3
"Sonnet en ix" ( Mallarme) , 1 36
Soupau lt, Philippe, 1 20
Sou they, Rober t , 40 , 4 1
Speech of 01rist, fro m the Universe,

71zat Tlzere Is No God. See Dream
Spencer, Herber t , 87
Spring and All (Williams), 1 40
Staet, Mad ame d e , 4 8 , 1 2 9

Stalin, 9 2 , 1 0 2, 1 04 , 1 4 5 , 1 76
Stendhal , 6 9
Stevens, Walla ce , 1 20 , 1 3 5
Studies in Romanticism (K ing), 1 6 7
Suetio, El (1. I . d e la Cruz) , 1 3 8
Surrealis m , 5 5 , 1 1 5 , 1 1 9 , 1 20 , 1 3 1 , 1 3 3 ,
1 34 , 1 4 3 , 1 44 , 1 4 7 , 1 4 9
Swedenborg, Emanuel, 69, 94
Symbolism , 88, 96, 1 1 5 , 1 1 9, 1 35 ,
1 39 , 1 5 9 , 1 6 9
Tablad a , J o se Juan, 95 , 1 4 0
Tit o , Marshal, 1 4 5
Tradition of th e New, Tile ( Rosenberg),
2
Trilce ( Va llej o ) , 1 4 1
Tristan , Flora , 69
Tro tsk y , Leon D . , 1 0 3, 1 04 , 1 0 6, 1 07 ,
1 33, 145, 1 76
Tu Fu , 8 1
Tum of th e Screw, The (Ja mes), 1 6 2

TwelPe, Tlte ( Blok), 1 05
"Two Cou ntries" ( Marti), 1 00

Tzara, Trista n , 1 1 9 , 1 20
Ultraismo, 1 2 0 , 1 39
Unamuno , Miguel de, 90, 9 8 , 1 6 8
Ungar e t t i , Giuseppe, 1 1 9 , 1 2 1
Valery , Pa ul, 4 8 , 1 39
Valle l n clan , Ramon del, 98
Vallejo , Cesar , 4 3 , 1 3 7 , 1 4 1 , 1 44
Vallo n , Anne Marie ( Annet te), 4 2
1 86
Vanguard ia , 88, 97
Vanguard ismo , 9 6
Vega Carpio, Lope de, I 0 1
Verlaine, Paul, 80
Villaur rutia , Xavier , 1 44 , 1 46
Virgil, 1 6 , 2 1 . 4 6 , 6 2 , 1 4 2
Vit ier , Cin tio , 1 46
Vo ltaire, Fran!;ois Marie Aro ue t de,
54, 1 69
Waste Land, The (Elio t ) , 5 5 , 1 1 9, 1 35 ,
1 36
Weber, Ma x, 1 1 7
Whit man, Wal t , 8 0 , 1 1 7 , 1 1 8 , I 23-1 2 5
Wharf, Benjamin Lee , 7
Williams, William Carlo s , 1 1 9, 1 35 ,
1 37, 1 4 0 , 1 42
Wordsworth, Do rothy, 4 2
Wo rdswor t h , William , 3 6 , 4 1 -4 3, 5 7 ,
60, 80
Yea ts, W . B . , 5 5 , 94 , 1 3 7
Zau m, 1 1 8
Zelaya , J o se San tos, 9 2

Zone ( Apollinaire ), 1 20
Zukofsky, Louis, 1 4 2

Paz, Octavio - Children of The Mire (Harvard, 1974)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Paz, Octavio - Children of The Mire (Harvard, 1974)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Children of the Mire

The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1971-1972

Children of the Mire

OCTA VIO PAZ

Translated by Rachel Phillips

Harvard University Press

Copyright 1974 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

Despi te language and cu ltural d i fferences the Western world

or purple . Analogy and irony confront the poe t with the

sign as en rota cion , a poetic manifesto I published in

I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to the translator, Rachel

Phillip s , to Ann Louise M c Laughlin, and to the poe t William

A Tradition against Itself

The Revolt of the Future

Children of the Mire

4 Analogy and Irony

Translation and Metaphor

6 The Closing of the Circle

The Patt ern Reversed

The Twilight of the Avant-Garde

Sources and Credits

Mais I ' oracle invoque pour jamais dut se taire;

(Le Christ aux Oliviers, V)

A Trad it ion against Itself

discon tinuity implies the negation not only of traditio n but of

o th er. The modern is characterized not only by novelty but by

A Tradition against I tself

modernity is condemned to pluralism : the old tradi tio n was

is sufficient unto itself; it fou nd s its own tradition . n example

cyclical , but which is not random either. There are periods

Children of the Mire

rlegation, we must move

the end of the e ighteenth century , to the beginning of the

A Tradition against Itself

Children of the M ire

Critical passion : excessive, impassioned love of criticism and

which the variations and exceptions are actually variations from

A Tradition against Itself

Ye t never before has age overtaken us as rapidly as tod ay.

Children of the Mire

A Tra dition against Itself

researchers had noticed the existence and the p ersisten ce of a

transformations, one fact remains: our image of time has

Children of the M ire

A Tradition against Itself

dissolves the con trad ictions be tween what happened y esterday

Children of the Mire

A Tradition against Itself

into a hard , precious substance , as if it wished to escap e from

Children of the M ire

time and language , a reality adm itting of no names other than

A Tradition against Itself

Children of the Mire

which has gained wisdom be subm itted to these ceaseless migra

eternal p resent, after the Last J udgment, is the death o f death-

A Trad ition against Itsel f

the death of change . The affirmation of Christian eternity is

Children of the Mire

them completely, either by the conjunction of times in an

A Trad ition against Itself

Children of the M ire

The Revolt of the Future

In every socie ty generations weave a web of repe tition s and